Mining Temporal Data: A Coal-Fired Boiler Case Study

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to control pluggage of a coal-fired boiler. The proposed approach involves statistics, data partitioning, parameter reduction, and data mining. The proposed approach was tested on a 750 MW commercial coal-fired boiler affected with a fouling problem that leads to boiler pluggage that causes unscheduled shutdowns. The rare-event detection approach presented in the paper identified several critical time-based data segments that are indicative of the ash pluggage.