Combustion monitoring of a water tube boiler using a discriminant radial basis network.

This research work includes a combination of Fisher's linear discriminant (FLD) analysis and a radial basis network (RBN) for monitoring the combustion conditions for a coal fired boiler so as to allow control of the air/fuel ratio. For this, two-dimensional flame images are required, which were captured with a CCD camera; the features of the images-average intensity, area, brightness and orientation etc of the flame-are extracted after preprocessing the images. The FLD is applied to reduce the n-dimensional feature size to a two-dimensional feature size for faster learning of the RBN. Also, three classes of images corresponding to different burning conditions of the flames have been extracted from continuous video processing. In this, the corresponding temperatures, and the carbon monoxide (CO) emissions and those of other flue gases have been obtained through measurement. Further, the training and testing of Fisher's linear discriminant radial basis network (FLDRBN), with the data collected, have been carried out and the performance of the algorithms is presented.