Title: A novel approach for modelling of NOx emission reduction in a tangentially fired coal boiler

Authors: P. Ilamathi; V. Selladurai; K. Balamurugan

Addresses: Tamilnadu Generation and Distribution Corporation Ltd., Hydro Training Institute, Bhavani 638311, TN, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Coimbatore 641014, TN, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Road and Transport Technology, Erode 638316, TN, India

Abstract: In this research paper, predictive modelling of NOx emission of a 210 MW capacity pulverised coal-fired boiler and combustion parameter optimisation to reduce NOx emission in flue gas is proposed. The effects of oxygen concentration in flue gas, coal properties, coal flow, boiler load, air distribution scheme, flue gas outlet temperature and nozzle tilt were studied. The data collected from parametric field experiments were used to build a feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural net (ANN). The coal combustion parameters were used as inputs and NOx emission as outputs of the model. The ANN model was developed for full load condition and its predicted values were verified with the actual values. The algebraic equation containing weights and biases of the trained net was used as fitness function in sequential quadratic programming (SQP) and genetic algorithm (GA) to find the optimum level of input operating conditions for low NOx emission. The results proved that the proposed approach could be used for generating feasible operating conditions. [Received: January 18 2012; Accepted: March 24 2012]

Keywords: predictive modelling; NOx emissions; emissions reduction; tangentially fired coal boilers; environmental pollution; artificial neural networks; ANNs; quadratic programming; genetic algorithms; optimisation; combustion parameters; parameter optimisation; oxygen concentration; coal properties; coal flow; boiler load; air distribution scheme; flue gas outlet temperature; nozzle tilt.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2013.054824

International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology, 2013 Vol.6 No.4, pp.449 - 461

Received: 08 Feb 2012
Accepted: 24 Mar 2012
Published online: 29 Jan 2014 *

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