Prediction of oxygen content in flue gas of power plant with stacked target-enhanced autoencoder and attention-based LSTM

Abstract

Accurate and robust measurement of the oxygen content in the flue gas of power plant is significant to optimal the coal combustion process. Conventional hard measurement algorithms have low accuracy, short lifetime and high cost. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a precise and reliable soft measurement model. However, how to extract effective feature representations from complex process data is still the difficult and hot spot in the soft measurement field. The paper develops a novel soft measurement model, which integrates stacked target-enhanced autoencoder (STAE) with attention mechanism-based long short-term memory (ALSTM) in view of the above issues. The data cleaning strategy is firstly designed to filter the redundant data from the original data. Then STAE is developed to extract the useful features, which introduces target output into each autoencoder to ensure the feature representation is output-related and stacks several autoencoder units to learn high-level information. The extracted hierarchical features can not only represent the input data, but also have high correlation with the target output. A three-layer-based attention network is designed to allocate different weights on the different levels’ features. Finally, due to the dynamic characteristic of the problem, a LSTM-based prediction network is dexterously designed to learn the potential relation from extracted features to target output, i.e., oxygen content. Numerous real-word data is collected from a 300 MW power plant and extensive experiments are conducted. The maximum prediction errors of A and B are 0.42 and 0.41. The 95.1 % prediction errors of A side are within [−0.2, 0.2], and the 96.2 % prediction errors of B side are within [−0.2, 0.2].