STATISTICA Blogs

TULSA, OK (Jan. 11, 2008) - Dr. Thomas Hill, VP Analytic Solutions at StatSoft will be presenting a paper at the 2008 Power River Basin Coal Users' Group at Electric Power 2008 in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Hill will present the paper, Successful Robust Optimization Strategies Based on Historical Data for Existing Coal Burning Furnace Technologies (Beyond DOE, CFD, and Statistical Modeling), along with Douglas Shuit, Process Performance Engineer, Alliant Energy.

This presentation will illustrate the approach and specific methodologies in various case studies involving cyclone and wall-fired furnaces to:

•  lower emissions (NOx, CO)
• improve the consistency (robustness, availability) of operations over a wide range of coal flows, loads, fuel qualities, etc.,

This leads to:

• less downtime (greater reliability of generation capacity)
• lower operational costs
• improved safety

These methods can be applied to virtually any boiler technology and plants with various degrees of instrumentation. And typically modifications to the control system aren't required.

The presentation will also be contrasted with traditional analytic approaches:

•  DOE (design of experiments)
• CFD (computational fluid dynamics)
• neural-networks and neural-networks based closed loop control and "optimization"

None of these methods can address complex systems with large numbers of parameters. They are often costly to implement (e.g., closed loop control). And they are not suitable to achieve robust optimization of multiple performance goals (low NOx, CO, LOI, etc.) with existing instrumentation and control systems.