Improving people's health by burning low-pollution coal to improve air quality for thermal power generation

Eliminating the NO_x emission after coal combustion is a critical task for thermal power plants to reduce threats to the human body, such as respiratory diseases, heart disease, lung disease and even lung cancer. To this end, various treatments have been taken to optimize, monitor and control the combustion process. However, optimizing the coal composition prior to combustion can further reduce possible NO_x emissions. This topic was rarely discussed in the past. To fill this gap, this study proposes a fuzzy big data analytics approach. The proposed methodology combines recursive feature elimination, fuzzy c-means, XG Boost, support vector regression, random forests, decision trees and deep neural networks to predict post-combustion NO_x emission based on coal composition and specification. Subsequently, additional treatments can be implemented to optimize boiler configuration and combustion conditions with pollution prevention equipment. In other words, the method proposed in this study is a kind of pretreatment. The proposed methodology has been applied to the real case of a thermal power plant in Taiwan. Experimental results showed that the prediction accuracy using the proposed methodology was significantly better than several existing methods. The forecasting error, measured in terms of root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error, was only 14.55 ppm and 8.9%, respectively.