Flue Gas Monitoring System With Empirically-Trained Dictionary

The monitoring of flue gas of the thermal power plants is of great significance in energy conservation and environmental protection.Spectral technique has been widely used in the gas monitoring system for predicting the concentrations of specific gas components.This paper proposes flue gas monitoring system with empirically-trained dictionary(ETD)to deal with the complexity and biases brought by the uninformative spectral data.Firstly,ETD is extracted from the raw spectral data by an alternative optimization between the sparse coding stage and the dictionary update stage to minimize the error of sparse representation.D1,D2 and D3 are three types of ETD obtained by different methods.Then,the predictive model of component concentration is constructed on the ETD.In the experiments,two real flue gas spectral datasets are collected and the proposed method combined with the partial least squares,the background propagation neural network and the support vector machines are performed.Moreover,the optimal parameters are chosen according to the 10-fold root-mean-square error of cross validation.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be used for quantitative analysis effectively and ETD can be applied to the gas monitoring systems.

In-situ measurement and distribution of flue gas mercury for a utility PC boiler system

The in-situ instrumentation technique for measuring mercury and itsspeciation downstream a utility 100 MW pulverized coal (PC) fired boiler system was developed andconducted by the use of the Ontario hydro method (OHM) consistent with American standard test methodtogether with the semi-continuous emissions monitoring (SCEM) system as well as a mobile laboratoryfor mercury monitoring. The mercury and its speciation concentrations including participate mercuryat three locations of before air preheater, before electrostatic precipitator (ESP) and after ESPwere measured using the OHM and SCEM methods under normal operation conditions of the boiler systemas a result of firing a bituminous coal. The vapor-phase total mercury Hg(VT) concentration declinedwith the decrease of flue gas temperature because of mercury species transformation from oxidizedmercury to particulate mercury as the flue gas moved downstream from the air preheater to the ESPand after the ESP. A good agreement for Hg°, Hg^(2+) and Hg( VT) was obtained between the twomethods in the ash-free area. But in the dense particle-laden flue gas area, there appeared to be abig bias for mercury speciation owing to dust cake formed in the filter of OHM sampling probe. Theparticulateaffinity to the flue gas mercury and the impacts of sampling condition to accuracy ofmeasure were discussed.

Sniffing with mass spectrometry

Gaseous compounds are usually on-line detectable on sensors. The limitations of conventional sensors are suffering from incapability for exactly identifying multiple components as well as incompatibility to possible toxicants in every odor sample. Herein, we discuss an inlet modification to the laboratory standard mass spectrometer, inspired by the sensitive olfactory systems of animals, for direct sniffing,established by connecting a mini pump to the nebulizer gas tubing. The modified mass spectrometry method—sniffing-mass spectrometry(sniffing-MS)—can acquire detailed fingerprint spectra of mixed odors and shows high tolerance to toxicants. Furthermore, the method has a low limit of detection in the order of parts per trillion and is a ‘sampling-free' technique for analyzing various gaseous compounds simultaneously, thus offering versatility for smelling daily commodities, tracking diffusion, and locating position of odors. Sniffing-MS can mimic or even surpass the olfaction of animals and is applicable for analyzing gaseous/volatile compounds, especially those polar compounds, in a simple manner depending on the intrinsic molecular mass-to-charge ratio.