Prediction of Outlet Pressure for the Sulfur Dioxide Blower Based on Conv1D-BiGRU Model and Genetic Algorithm

The sulfur dioxide blower is a centrifugal blower that transports various gases in the process of acid production with flue gas. Accurate prediction of the outlet pressure of the sulfur dioxide blower is quite significant for the process of acid production with flue gas. Due to the internal structure of the sulfur dioxide blower being complex, its mechanism model is difficult to establish. A novel method combining one-dimensional convolution (Conv1D) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) is proposed for short-term prediction of the outlet pressure of sulfur dioxide blower. Considering the external factors such as inlet pressure and inlet flow rate of the blower, the proposed method first uses Conv1D to extract periodic and local correlation features of these external factors and the blower's outlet pressure data. Then, BiGRU is used to overcome the complexity and nonlinearity in prediction. More importantly, genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the important hyperparameters of the model. Experimental results show that the combined model of Conv1D and BiGRU optimized by GA can predict the outlet pressure of sulfur dioxide blower accurately in the short term, in which the root mean square error (RMSE) is 0.504, the mean absolute error (MAE) is 0.406, and R-square (R ²) is 0.993. Also, the proposed method is superior to LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, BiGRU, and Conv1D-BiLSTM.