Initial studies on the possibility to use chemical sensors to monitor and control boilers

Abstract

Small-scale boilers are quite often installed in facilities like schools, households and at local heat distributors. Because of economical considerations such boilers often lack appropriate control-systems, which results in inefficient and pollutant combustions with high levels of carbon monoxides, hydrocarbons, and in ashes with unburned charcoal. Monitoring of oxygen, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons, which is essential to be able to control a boiler, requires expensive instruments like flame-ionization detectors, IR- and mass-spectrometers. We demonstrate the possibility to use a low-cost chemical sensor array to monitor a small-scaled boiler. By using metal oxide sensors, metal insulator silicon carbide field effect transistors, and by applying multivariate data modeling, promising results have been obtained. The data modeling was made using a joint approach based on blind source separations and multiple linear regressions. This approach showed similar result compared to results from the well-known PLSR algorithm. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.