Rapid proximate analysis of coal based on reflectance spectroscopy and deep learning

Proximate analysis of coal is of profound significance for understanding coal quality and promoting rational utilization of coal resources. Traditional coal proximate analysis mainly uses chemical analysis methods, which have the disadvantages of slow speed and high cost. This paper proposed an approach combining reflectance spectroscopy with deep learning (DL) for rapid proximate analysis of coal. First, 80 sets of coal spectral data are enhanced by data augmentation, outlier detection, and dimensional transformation to improve the number and quality of samples. Then, an analytical model combining dilated convolution, multi-level residual connection, and a two-hidden-layer extreme learning machine (TELM), named DR_TELM, was proposed. The model extracted effective features from coal spectral data by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and utilized TELM as a regressor to achieve feature identification and content prediction. The experimental results showed that DR_TELM achieved coefficients of determination (R²) of 0.981, 0.989, 0.990, 0.985, 0.989 and root mean square errors (RMSE) of 0.533, 1.833, 1.111, 1.808, 0.723 for the content prediction of moisture, ash, volatile matter, fixed carbon and higher heating value (HHV), respectively. And while ensuring high accuracy, the test time is only 0.034 s. It is fully demonstrated that DR_TELM can rapidly and accurately analyze coal.