ABSTRACT
Fossil fuel–fired boiler combustion optimization is significant for many countries because fossil fuel power plants still play a dominant role in electricity generation, and more than 40% of electricity worldwide is from fossil fuel. This research literature review, which focuses on how to solve the specific problems of the combustion process, shows that a number of methods are applied to improve fossil fuel boiler combustion efficiency. These methods improve the performance of conventional proportional–integral–derivative (PID)-based controllers, which are widely applied in the power-generation industry to optimize the combustion process. In addition, some of these methods are applied to assess the status of equipment of a boiler to tune the conventional control system by assigning an optimal set point value for parameters or to conduct operations to adjust the combustion system exactly and efficiently. Because the boiler-combustion process is a highly complex system with nonlinear, multi-input, and multioutput characteristics, these methods are based on neural networks (NNs), genetic algorithms, and digital-simulation technology.
