Simulation on an optimal combustion control strategy for 3-D temperature distributions in tangentially pc-fired utility boiler furnaces

The control of 3-D temperature distribution in a utility boiler furnace is essential for the safe, economic and clean operation of pc-fired furnace with multi-burner system. The development of the visualization of 3-D temperature distributions in pc-fired furnaces makes it possible for a new combustion control strategy directly with the furnace temperature as its goal to improve the control quality for the combustion processes. Studied in this paper is such a new strategy that the whole furnace is divided into several parts in the vertical direction, and the average temperature and its bias from the center in every cross section can be extracted from the visualization results of the 3-D temperature distributions. In the simulation stage, a computational fluid dynamics(CFD) code served to calculate the 3-D temperature distributions in a furnace, then a linear model was set up to relate the features of the temperature distributions with the input of the combustion processes, such as the flow rates of fuel and air fed into the furnaces through all the burners. The adaptive genetic algorithm was adopted to find the optimal combination of the whole input parameters which ensure to form an optimal 3-D temperature field in the furnace desired for the operation of boiler. Simulation results showed that the strategy could soon find the factors making the temperature distribution apart from the optimal state and give correct adjusting suggestions.