An Unsupervised Classification Method for Flame Image of Pulverized Coal Combustion Based on Convolutional Auto-Encoder and Hidden Markov Model

Tian Qiu, Minjian Liu, Guiping Zhou, Li Wang and Kai Gao
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Tian Qiu: Beijing Key Laboratory of New Technology and System on Measuring and Control for Industrial Process, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China
Minjian Liu: Beijing Key Laboratory of New Technology and System on Measuring and Control for Industrial Process, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China
Guiping Zhou: State Grid Liaoning Electric Power Supply Co, Ltd., Shenyang 110004, Liaoning Province, China
Li Wang: State Grid Liaoning Electric Power Supply Co, Ltd., Shenyang 110004, Liaoning Province, China
Kai Gao: State Grid Liaoning Electric Power Supply Co, Ltd., Shenyang 110004, Liaoning Province, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 13, 1-17

Abstract: Combustion condition monitoring is a fundamental and critical issue that needs to be addressed in the wide-load operation of coal-fired boilers. In this paper, an unsupervised classification framework based on the convolutional auto-encoder (CAE), the principal component analysis (PCA), and the hidden Markov model (HMM) is proposed to monitor the combustion condition with the uniformly spaced flame images, which are collected from the furnace combustion monitoring system. First, CAE is adopted to extract the features from the flame images, which obtain the sparse representations in the images. Then, PCA is applied to project the feature vectors into the orthogonal space for robustness and computation efficiency. Finally, a HMM is built to calculate the corresponding optimal states by learning the temporal behaviors in the compressed representations. A coal combustion adjustment experiment was conducted in a 660 MW opposed-firing boiler, and the sequential 14,400 flame images with three different combustion states were obtained to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We tested six different compression dimensions of the latent variable z in the CAE model and ensured that the appropriate compress parameter was 1024. The proposed framework is compared with five other methods: the CAE + Gaussian mixture model (GMM), CAE + Kmean, the CAE + fuzzy c-mean method, CAE + HMM, and the traditional handcraft feature extraction method (TH) + HMM. The results show that the proposed framework has the highest classification accuracy (95.25% for the training samples and 97.36% for the testing samples) and has the best performance in recognizing the semi-stable state (85.67% for the training samples and 77.60% for the testing samples), indicating that the proposed framework is capable of identifying the combustion condition, changing when the combustion deteriorates as the coal feed rate falls.

Keywords: flame images; convolutional auto-encoder; hidden Markov model; unsupervised classification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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