Prediction of Oxygen Content in Boiler Flue Gas Based on a Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

As one of the core pieces of equipment of the thermal power generation system, the economic and environmental performance of a boiler determines the energy efficiency of the thermal power generation unit. The oxygen content in boiler flue gas is an important parameter reflecting the combustion status of the furnace, and accurate prediction of flue gas oxygen content is of great significance for online boiler optimization. In order to solve the online prediction problem of the oxygen content in boiler flue gas, a CNN is applied to build a time series prediction model, which takes the time series samples within a fixed time window as the input of the model and uses several feature extraction modules containing convolutional, activation, and pooling layers for feature extraction and compression, and the model output is the oxygen content in boiler flue gas. Since the oxygen content in boiler flue gas is not only correlated with other variables but also influenced by its own historical trend, the input of the CNN model is improved, and an oxygen content in boiler flue gas time series prediction model (TS-CNN) is established, which takes the historical values of the boiler flue gas oxygen content as the input of the model. The comparison test results show that the R2 and RMSE of the TS-CNN model are 0.8929 and 0.1684, respectively. The prediction accuracy is higher than the CNN model, LSSVM model, and BPNN model by 18.6%, 31.2%, and 54.6%, respectively.