Stacked auto-encoder modeling of an ultra-supercritical boiler-turbine system

Abstract

The ultra-supercritical (USC) coal-fired boiler-turbine unit has been widely used in modern power plants due to its high efficiency and low emissions. Since it is a typical multivariable system with large inertia, severe nonlinearity, and strong coupling, building an accurate model of the system using traditional identification methods are almost impossible. In this paper, a deep neural network framework using stacked auto-encoders (SAEs) is presented as an effective way to model the USC unit. In the training process of SAE, maximum correntropy is chosen as the loss function, since it can effectively alleviate the influence of the outliers existing in USC unit data. The SAE model is trained and validated using the real-time measurement data generated in the USC unit, and then compared with the traditional multilayer perceptron network. The results show that SAE has superiority both in forecasting the dynamic behavior as well as eliminating the influence of outliers. Therefore, it can be applicable for the simulation analysis of a 1000 MW USC unit.