Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998

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Energy Conversion and Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enconman

Estimation of furnace exit gas temperature (FEGT) using optimized radial basis
and back-propagation neural networks
J.S. Chandok a,1, I.N. Kar b,*, Suneet Tuli c
a
Energy Technologies, NTPC Limited, New Delhi 110003, India
b
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, New Delhi 110016, India
c
Center for Applied Research in Electronics, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, New Delhi 110016, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The boiler is a very important component of a thermal power plant, and its efficient operation requires
Received 30 October 2006 continuous online information of various relevant parameters. Furnace exit gas temperature (FEGT) is
Received in revised form 25 July 2007 one such important design/operating parameter. Knowledge of FEGT is not only useful for design of con-
Accepted 5 March 2008
vective heating surface but also helpful for operating actions and decision making. Its online information
Available online 28 April 2008
ensures improvement in economic benefit of the power plant. Non-availability of FEGT on the operator
desk greatly limits efficient operation. In this study, a novel method of estimating FEGT using neural net-
Keywords:
work is presented. The training data are first generated by calculating FEGT using heat balances through
Boiler
Furnace exit gas temperature (FEGT)
various heat exchangers. Prediction accuracy and fast response are major advantages in using neural net-
Prediction work for estimating FEGT for operator information. Two types of feed forward neural modeling networks,
Neural network radial basis function and back-propagation network, were applied and compared based on their network
RBF simplicity, model building and prediction accuracy. Results are verified on practical data obtained from a
210 MW boiler of a thermal power plant.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In conventional two pass pulverized fuel (PF) boilers, combus-
tion takes place in the furnace and circulating fluid inside evapora-
tive furnace tubes absorbs less than half of the total fuel heat.
Furnace tubes viewed by the flame are treated as radiant heat
transfer surfaces whereas other boiler tubes downstream of fur-
nace are assumed convective or a combination of two types [1].
In the furnace exit, flue gases produced as a product of combustion,
attain a certain temperature termed as furnace exit gas tempera-
ture (FEGT). The FEGT is an important design and operating param-
eter and can be defined as the ratio of heat absorption by the
radiant heating surfaces in the furnace and that by the convective
heating surfaces downstream of the furnace [2].
A high value of FEGT would make the furnace compact but the
convective sections larger. The FEGT is chosen to be below the ash
deformation temperature, to avoid severe fouling of back-pass
tubes by molten ash. Similarly special provision of over fire air is
also made in some large furnace boiler to reduce peak furnace tem-
perature, CO formation and to improve furnace safety. Further,
inferior coal firing leads to excessive soot formation and ash on
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 11 26591093; fax: +91 11 26581264.
E-mail addresses: jschandok@gmail.com (J.S. Chandok), ink@ee.iitd.ac.in (I.N.
Kar).
1
Tel.: +91 9868390930.
the furnace water wall tubes and causing high FEGT value. The
knowledge of FEGT is useful for the design of convective heating
surfaces and plant operating actions, which ensures improvement
in the economic benefit of the power plant. Non-availability of
FEGT on the operator desk puts great limitation on efficient oper-
ation. In PF boiler, predominant design and operating consider-
ations that govern FEGT are size of convective sections, ash
deformation temperature, NOx formation and pollution control.
Conventionally thermocouples, furnace temperature probes,
etc., mounted on the left and right side of furnace are generally em-
ployed to measure FEGT. However their performance is compro-
mised due to inability to sustain such high temperature.
Recently, in a few power plants, methods like acoustics pyrometer,
optical pyrometer, etc., have been used but have not become pop-
ular due to their own limitations of high cost, lens fouling, combus-
tion noise and frequent calibration. Alternately, FEGT can also be
calculated analytically by carrying out heat balances in various
heat exchangers in the flue gas path. Since FEGT depends on vari-
ous direct and indirect boiler parameters, it is difficult to build a
precise mathematical model.
A novel approach of estimating FEGT using artificial neural net-
work is proposed in this paper. Neural network can be used as
model free estimator, capable of estimating from available historic
data called training data, consisting of both inputs and output. In
this study, FEGT is considered to be the output of neural network,
which is not directly measurable. Hence to know this output an

0196-8904/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.enconman.2008.03.011
1990 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998
Nomenclature
hgo flue gas enthalpy at economizer O/L in BTU/lb
Tgo flue gas temperature at economizer outlet in °F
Tgi flue gas temperature at economizer outlet in °F
hgi energy of the flue gas at the economizer inlet
hfwi feed water enthalpy at economizer inlet
hfwo feed water enthalpy at economizer outlet
yj(k) output of the neuron j
dj(k) desired value for neuron j
ej(k) error function of neuron j
analytical calculation of FEGT is first carried out using heat balance
in each heat exchanger in the flue gas path. This requires knowl-
edge of pressure, temperature and flow of working fluid at the inlet
and outlet of each heat exchanger. A total of nine input parameters
(Section 3) based on the operator’s experience and theoretical
studies have been selected as input to the neural network. These
inputs may or may not have direct mathematical relation with
FEGT, but certainly have great influence on it.
Prediction accuracy and faster response are major concerns in
using neural network for reliable and meaningful value of FEGT
for operator information. This work also contributes to evaluating
the prediction ability of two important neural networks using ra-
dial basis function (RBF) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) back-
propagation networks respectively. Measures such as correlation
coefficient, prediction error bar chart, speed, etc., are adopted to
compare the performance of these two network. These neural net-
work modeling methods are currently becoming very popular be-
cause of their applications in various disciplines, e.g. prediction
of coal ash fusion temperature [11], turbogenerator control [14],
solar array modeling and maximum power point prediction [15],
and power plant condenser performance [18]. Amoudi and Zhang
[15] reported comparison of BP and RBF neural network and con-
cluded that BP take longer time but require less information as
compare to RBF. Optimized design of neural networks has been re-
ported, depending on their application. Prieto et al. [18] applied
artificial neural network for power plant condenser and reported
that the design of the neural network could be enhanced by knowl-
edge of physical variables. FEGT, though a very important measure-
ment for plant operation, has received fairly little attention in the
literature for estimating it using artificial neural network. There is
no reference found available in open literature where FEGT is esti-
mated using ANN.
This paper first describes an analytical calculation of FEGT using
convective heat transfer in the backward path. Important consider-
ations for selection of plant parameters as input to the neural net-
work are then elaborated. Architecture and training of feed
forward network both for MLP network and RBF network is ex-
plained and the results and performance comparison of both MLP
and RBF network discussed comparing their advantages and
disadvantages.
2. Process description and FEGT calculation
Heat transfer in steam generator is a complex and inexact phe-
nomenon due to its geometry, absorbing gas volumes and furnace
walls, etc., and thus there are varied opinion regarding which cor-
relation to apply in a particular situation. There are three mecha-
nisms of heat transfer; conduction, convection and radiation –
similar in some aspects but quite different in others.
When fuel burns in the boiler it releases a large amount of en-
ergy, which heats up the product of combustion (flue gas) to a very
high temperature. This temperature may range from 1500 °C to
wlij connecting weight for ith neuron in the Lth layer
E(k) instantaneous sum squared error
g learning rate
/0 derivative of activation function
yL1 final output of first neuron in the Lth layer
cj center of the RBF neuron in the hidden layer
xi training data
r width of the Gaussian function
k regularization parameter
1600 °C in the flame core. Though the flue gas is cooled by the
evaporator and platen superheater in the furnace, the temperature
at the exit of the furnace is still in the range of 1000–1250 °C. Since
the flue gas flows through the furnace at a low velocity, only a
small fraction of the total heat transferred to the walls is through
convection.
After leaving the furnace the flue gas enters the convective sec-
tion of the boiler at furnace exit gas temperature as shown in Fig. 1,
where it cools further by transferring heat to water, steam and in
some cases to combustion air. The principal mode of heat transfer
in this section being forced convection this section is called the
convection section. Here, the gas enters at the FEGT and leaves at
slightly above the stack temperature [2]. In the boiler, the heat
exchangers located in the convective section include the reheater
(RHTR), final superheater (FNSH), low temperature superheater
(LTSH), economizer and air preheater (APH) all placed in series.
2.1. FEGT calculation
The method employed in the present work is the lumped anal-
ysis approach in which a heat exchanger can be defined by average
characteristics. The analytical method is based on a series of heat
balances beginning with the average flue gas temperature mea-
sured with a left and right thermocouple at the economizer outlet.
By working upstream toward the furnace outlet, the average gas
temperature entering each tube bank is determined using a series
of heat transfers calculations. Heat gained by the working fluid
(water or steam) equals the heat lost by the flue gas. The last heat
transfer section in this series of calculations is the reheater and the
last, or reheater inlet gas temperature, is the FEGT [3].
Fig. 1. Overview of boiler and location of furnace exit gas plane.
 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998 1991

Flue gas temperature at the inlet of any heat exchanger can be a  T 2gi þ b  T gi þ ðc  hgi Þ ¼ 0
calculated by first calculating flue gas enthalpy from known outlet qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2
temperature at the outlet of this heat exchanger by a quadratic b  b  4aðc  hgi Þ
! Economizer inlet temperature; T gi ¼
equation as given below [4]. 2a
Flue gas enthalpy at economizer outlet, is given by ð3Þ

hgo ¼ a  T 2go þ b  T go þ c
where hgo is in BTU/lb and Tgo is flue gas temperature at economizer
outlet in °F.
The value of scalar constants a, b, c in Eq. (1) for a relevant range
of temperature is
a ¼1:725460  105
b ¼0:2336275
c ¼18:58662
The total energy of the flue gas at the inlet of the economizer (hgi)
will be the sum of the flue gas energy at the outlet of economizer
calculated from Eq. (1) and heat energy gained by the feed water
from flue gas.
hgi ¼ hgo þ ðhfwo  hfwi Þ
where hfwi and hfwo are specific enthalpies of feed water at econo-
mizer inlet and outlet, respectively. Further with the known value
of specific enthalpy at the inlet of economizer hgi, Eq. (1) can be
used again, but this time to calculate economizer inlet temperature
Tgi as follows:
ð1Þ This economizer inlet flue gas temperature will be taken as the
averaged outlet temperature of the low temperature superheater
(LTSH) (next element of the series, in backward path) and the tem-
perature at the inlet of LTSH can be calculated, which will be used
to know the averaged temperature at the final superheater inlet.
Likewise, this final superheater inlet temperature will be consid-
ered as averaged reheater outlet temperature and finally used to
calculate the reheater inlet temperature (FEGT). Fig. 2 shows the
variation of calculated FEGT, load and feed water (FW) flow.
Figs. 3 and 4 indicate the convective heat transfer and flue gas
temperature at the inlet of various components of boiler at full load
and part load, respectively. They confirm that the heat transfer in
the reheater is maximum among all considered components, be-
cause reheater being nearest to the furnace is subjected to very
high temperature, due to which some radiative heat transfer is also
ð2Þ present. Further as per design, reheater is a single component,
whereas the superheater is divided into three subcomponents,
each sharing some amount of heat transfer. Total heat transfer in
superheater (Platen + LTSH + Final SH) is much more than the heat
transfer in reheater. These results also give the flue gas tempera-
tures at the inlet of various components, which are useful to know
the intermediate process conditions.

3. Inputs for neural network modeling

The main objective of the work is to make use of the potential of

neural networks, to estimate the FEGT. This requires proper selec-
tion of input parameters for the NN model and is based on the
rationale that all parameters, which have direct or indirect effect
on FEGT, ought to be included. As shown in Fig. 5, the important
input parameters selected for FEGT neural network modeling are

1. Feed water flow.

2. Total coal flow.
3. Secondary airflow.
4. Secondary air temperature.
5. Primary air to coal flow ratio.
6. Flue gas O2%.
7. Burner tilt.
8. Mill combination.
Fig. 2. Variation of load, FW flow and calculated FEGT for a set of operation. 9. Cleanliness factor.

Fig. 3. Heat transfer and temperature in various component of boiler (full load).
1992 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998
Fig. 4. Heat transfer and temperature in various component of boiler (part load).
Out of these parameters, feed water flow, coal flow, secondary
airflow and secondary air temperature are basically input condi-
tions to boiler and their variations are directly reflect the various
plant load conditions and hence different FEGT values. The remain-
ing parameters, i.e. PA/coal flow ratio, O2%, burner tilt, mill combi-
nation and cleanliness factor, though not mathematically related to
the FEGT, have a great influence on it at a particular operating load.
The velocity of primary stream must exceed the speed of flame
propagation so as to avoid flashback, and on leaving the burner
the velocity of the mixture must also be low enough for stable igni-
0:2xðMill AÞ þ 0:4xðMill BÞ þ 0:6xðMill CÞ þ 0:8xðMill DÞ þ 1:0xðMill EÞ þ 1:2xðMill FÞ
4:2
tion [5]. This ratio leads to variation in actual combustion and in
turn to FEGT. Generally the air–coal ratio of primary stream is
maintained as 2:1.
Flue gas O2%, CO2 and CO are the product of combustion and
characterize the quality of combustion and hence FEGT. As only
the O2% measurement was available in the plant chosen, it alone
was taken as input parameter for FEGT estimation. Burner tilt also
has great impact on FEGT as the temperature goes high when tilt is
in upward position and goes low in downward position. The last
two inputs, i.e. mill combination and cleanliness factor are calcu-
lated parameters. Unlike the other seven parameters, these are
not taken directly from plant data communication system. There
Fig. 5. Neural network input/output model.
are six coal mills in the selected 210 MW plant and at any time,
generally four mills are in service. The various combinations of four
running mills, i.e. lower, middle or upper combination, affects FEGT
at a particular load condition. A representative value correspond-
ing to each combination can be obtained by taking the weighted
average of mills in service. Upper mills are given more weightage
compared to lower mills, as FEGT will be higher when upper mills
are in service.
The input mill combination in service is computed by weighted
average method as
with (Mill X), which is in service, being considered as ‘1’ and not in
service as ‘0’.
Similarly input cleanliness factor, which is the ratio of actual
operating heat of combustion and design heat of combustion
[6,7] also influences the FEGT at a particular load condition. A high
cleanliness factor indicates a clean boiler leading to better heat
transfer, and thus comparatively low temperature at the furnace
exit.
Cleanliness Factor ¼ Operating heat of combustion=Design heat
of combustion
where heat of combustion is given by the sum (main steam heat
energy + reheater steam heat energy + blow down water heat en-
ergy SH spray heat energy + RH spray heat energy).
4. Neural network implementation
A feed forward network is a special architecture of neural net-
work in which neurons are organized in the form of layers. In this
work, two types of feed forward network namely multilayer per-
ceptron and radial basis function networks are adopted to estimate
FEGT.
The general architecture for a feed forward network is depicted
in Fig. 6, which is a standard architecture with one hidden layer.
MLP and RBF mainly differ in the type of neuron employed in the
hidden layer. The input layer consists of the descriptors, and the
output layer employed in this study for both networks is a linear
output function. The goal in neural modeling is to generate
weights, w, and bias, b, which model the data and act as coeffi-
cients to predict accurate output value [8–10].
 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998 1993

Fig. 6. General architecture of single hidden layer feed forward network.

4.1. Training data generation gation learning consists of two passes through the different layers
of the network: a forward pass and backward pass. In forward pass,
Input data samples used for training and testing of the neural an input vector is applied to the sensory nodes of the networks and
network model were collected from a 210 MW thermal power its effect propagates through the network, layer by layer. Finally, a
plant. All required data points are averaged over one minute in set of outputs is produced as the actual response of the network.
the communication system itself. In this way, data of around During the forward pass, all the synaptic weights of the network
3200 samples (known as exemplars) spanning over a period of are fixed while during backward pass the synaptic weights are ad-
three different days were collected. Inputs directly available from justed in accordance with the error correction rule [11].
the plant and other calculated parameters, along with target FEGT The error signal at the output of neuron j at iteration k is defined
are extracted from whole data set for neural network training. by
To avoid duplicity of input data, all data points with no varia-
ej ðkÞ ¼ dj ðkÞ  yj ðkÞ
tion in the values of parameters for successive samples are re-
moved from the training data sample. Also, data in which there where yj(k) is the output of the neuron j; dj(k) is the desired value
are extreme peculiarities is filtered out else the network ends up for neuron j; ej(k) is the error function of neuron j
memorizing input peculiarities with the result that the generaliza- The instantaneous sum squared error E(k) is given by
tion capability of the network becomes poor. In this manner, a total
1X 2
of 1489 data samples are selected for training, testing and EðkÞ ¼ e ðkÞ ð5Þ
2 j j
validation.
Neural network training can be made more efficient if certain and the mean squared error (MSE) is obtained by averaging E(k)
preprocessing steps are performed on the training data set. The in- over set size N is given by
put data to be applied to network and the target data for training
and testing is to be normalized in the range of the activation func- 1 XN
MSE ¼ Eav ðkÞ ¼ EðkÞ ð6Þ
tion. It is also to be seen that the normalized values of input and N k¼1
target data samples do not fall in the saturation regions of the acti-
vation function characteristic curve to avoid unrealistic network For layer l = 1, 2, . . ., L, yL1 will be final output of first neuron in the
response [11]. Hence, all data samples are normalized in the range output layer, which is a function of net input to this neuron. The
of 0.9 to+0.9 as the range of tan-sigmoid activation function is net input to ith neuron in the Lth layer is given as
from 1 to+1. nl1
X
For a variable with maximum and minimum values of Vmax and netLi ¼ ðwLij yL1
j þ wLi0 Þ ð7Þ
j¼1
Vmin, respectively, each value V is scaled to its normalized value A
using. yLi ¼ /ðnetLi Þ ð8Þ

  The nonlinear activation function /() employed in this study is the

ðV  V min Þ
A¼ 1:8  0:9 ð4Þ tan sigmoid function (hyperbolic tangent) given by
ðV max  V min Þ
1  enet
/ðnetÞ ¼ tanhðnet=2Þ ¼ ð9Þ
1 þ enet
4.2. MLP network with back-propagation algorithm
The weights wlij represent the connecting weight and their updation
MLP have been applied successfully to solve some difficult and rule is given by
diverse problems by training them in a supervised manner with an " #
1X P
algorithm known as back-propagation algorithm. Algorithm is wlij ðt þ DtÞ ¼ wlij ðtÞ þ g ðdip  ylip Þ  /0 ðnetip Þ  yl1
j ð10Þ
p p¼1
based on the error-correction-learning rule. The error back-propa-
1994 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998
where g is learning rate and /0 is derivative of the activation
function.
The process of iteration is continued until the total number of
iterations (epochs) is reached or the specified error level for train-
ing is attained. The speed of training a network is largely depen-
dent on the method of updating weight w and bias b in the
hidden layer and also on the size of the training data matrix. In
standard back-propagation w and b are updated by gradient des-
cent with w and being moved in the opposite direction to the error
gradient e. Each step down the gradient results in smaller errors
until the error minima is reached. Normally, momentum and learn-
ing rate terms are incorporated in the training scheme, which
makes changes proportional to the running average of the gradient
thereby speeding up the convergence process and reducing the risk
of trapping in a local minimum. In this work, the Levenberg–Mar-
quardt approximation [12] is employed which is several orders of
magnitude faster than standard gradient descent method. The
Levenberg–Marquardt rule states that change in weight DW is,
DW ¼ ðJT J þ lIÞ1 JT e
where J is the Jacobian matrix of derivatives of errors for each
weight, l is a scalar and e is an error vector, and I is the identity ma-
trix [9,12].
4.2.1. Initialization of the MLP network
The back-propagation learning algorithm is sensitive to initial
conditions. If the synaptic weights are assigned large initial value,
the activation function of neurons (the sigmoid function) will very
possibly reach saturation and thus, the whole MLP network will get
stuck in local minima [11]. On the other hand, if synaptic weights
are assigned a small initial value, the back-propagation algorithm
may operate on a very flat and around the origin of the error sur-
face. Many initialization methods have been put forward for the
back-propagation learning algorithm. In this work, a layer’s
weights and biases are initialized according to the Nguyen–Wid-
row initialization algorithm [12]. This algorithm chooses values
in order to distribute the active region of each neuron in the layer
evenly across the layer’s input space. As compared to purely ran-
dom weights and biases, this algorithm has the advantages that
fewer neurons are wasted (since all the neurons are in the input
space) and training works faster (since each area of the input space
has neurons).
4.2.2. Selection of MLP neural network architecture
A total of 1489 preprocessed data used in the present work was
divided suitably into three parts. Around 900 data are kept for
training, 200 data are kept for validation and 300 data are taken
for testing purpose.
Fig. 7. Comparison of energy value for the MLP with different hidden neurons.
In principle, it has been proved that a neural network model
with only one hidden layer can uniformly approximate any contin-
uous function [8,11]. In the present work, the FEGT approximation
with nine dimensional input spaces is carried out with a network
of single hidden layer with neurons varying from 2 to 9. MLP net-
works with different hidden neurons are trained with 900 patterns
and trained over 500 iterations. Energy function (MSE) of different
models for the 900 training patterns, against the different number
of neuron in hidden layer is plotted as shown in Fig. 7. This indi-
cates there is substantial improvement in the performance func-
tion up to 5 neurons in the hidden layer, however, there is
marginal improvement with further increase in number of neuron
from 6 to 10. In actual engineering system, the training data are
usually erroneous, so the too high training precision will overfit
the training pattern and then impede generalization of the MLP
network [11,13]. From this experiment and analysis, five neuron
are finally employed in the MLP network.
4.2.3. Selection of training precision
ð11Þ
To avoid overfitting due to large capacity of network and for
good generalization, cross-validation method for early stop [8,11]
is used in training the network. Early stopping is used to ensure
that the network would generalize well to unseen data. To apply
the cross-validation, the total data set is first partitioned into a
training set and a testing set. The training set is further partitioned
into two disjoint subsets:
 Estimation subset, used to select the model.
 Validation subset, used to validate the model.
The training subset is used to adapt the weights by Eqs. (5)–
(10). After each epoch, the network is queried with the input vec-
tors in the validation subset and the mean squared validation error
is calculated. The energy function for training patterns usually de-
creases with the progress of training, while that for validation pat-
terns decreases at the initial stage of training and then increases
with training further on, as shown in Fig. 8. The opinion that smal-
ler preset training precision, the better is the generalization of the
MLP network, is not always true, especially in actual applications,
because data from almost all the engineering systems are inevita-
bly corrupted by noise.
If the validation error increases with continued training, the
training is terminated due to potential for overfitting. If the valida-
tion error remains the same for more than 10 successive epochs, it
Fig. 8. MSE vs epoch for training and validation data set.
 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998 1995

2 3
is assumed that the network has converged. It can be seen from h1 ðx1 Þ h2 ðx1 Þ h3 ðx1 Þ  hm ðx1 Þ
Fig. 8, that the training stopped after only 18 iterations because 6 h1 ðx2 Þ h2 ðx2 Þ h3 ðx2 Þ  hm ðx2 Þ 7
6 7
the validation error increased which means the training above this 6. .. .. .. 7
6 7
H ¼ 6 .. . .  . 7
will impede the generalization capability of network. 6 7
6 .. .. .. .. 7
4. . .  . 5
4.3. Radial basis function network h1 ðxp Þ h2 ðxp Þ h3 ðxp Þ  hm ðxp Þ
1 T 1
The design of a supervised neural network may be pursued in a and A = (H H) .
variety of ways. The back-propagation algorithm for the design of a In practical situations, training based on available data (which is
multiplayer perceptron as described in previous section may be contaminated by noise also) is an ill-posed problem [12]. In that
viewed as the application of a recursive technique, however an- the large data sets may contain a surprisingly small amount of
other approach called radial basis function can be viewed as the information about the desired solution and there is no unique solu-
design of neural network vis-à-vis a curve fitting problem in a high tion exit. In such situations, it is necessary to supply extra informa-
dimensional space. RBF network has number of advantages over tion (or assumption). The mathematical technique for this is
the MLP with regard to training and locality of approximation, known as regularization [10]. In the linear model (12), model com-
making it an attractive alternative for on line applications [14]. plexity can be controlled by the addition of a penalty term. When
this combined error
4.3.1. Basic features of RBF network X
p X
m

The proposed RBF network for FEGT estimation is shown in
Fig. 6. It comprises three layers: the input layer, the hidden layer
and the output layer. The input layer consists of a nine dimensional
vector. The output layer has only one element, i.e. the FEGT. The
hidden layer is composed of m RBFs /j (j = 1, . . ., m) that are con-
nected directly to all the elements in the input layer. For a data
set consisting of N input vectors together with corresponding out-
put FEGT, there are N such hidden units, each corresponding to one
data point.
The activation function of hidden units is symmetric in the in-
put space, and the output of each hidden unit depends only on
the radial distance between the input vector and the center for
the hidden unit. The output of each hidden unit, hj, j = 1, 2, . . ., m,
is given by
hj ðxi Þ ¼ /ðkxi  cj kÞ
where /() is the Gaussian activation function is used and its trans-
fer function is
" #
kxi  cj k2
/j ðxi Þ ¼ exp 
2r2
where xi is the training data, cj is the center of the neuron in the hid-
den layer,r is the width of the Gaussian function and k.k is the
euclidean norm.
An RBF network is nonlinear if the basis functions can move or
change size or if there is more than one hidden layer. Here, we fo-
cus on single-layer network with functions that are fixed in posi-
tion and size. When applied to supervised learning with this
linear model, the least squares principle leads to a particularly easy
optimization problem. If the model is
X
m creases the sum-squared-error (SSE) most and had not already
f ðxÞ ¼ wj hj ðxÞ ð12Þ
j¼1
and the training set is fðxi; yi Þgpi¼1 , then the least square recipe is to
minimize the sum squared error
X
p tion (GCV) is used as the model selection criterion (MSC) to calcu-
S¼ ^i  f ðxi ÞÞ2
ðy ð13Þ
i¼1
with respect to weights of the model. The minimization of above
cost function leads to a set of m simultaneous linear equations in
the m unknown weights and these linear equations can be solved
to obtain optimal weight vector as
^ ¼ A1 HT y
^ trained network will perform in the future.
w ð14Þ
where the design matrix H, is
E¼ ðyi  f ðxi ÞÞ2 þ k w2j ð15Þ
i¼1 j¼1
is optimized, large components in the weight vector w are inhibited.
This kind of penalty is known as ridge regression or weight decay
and the parameterk, which controls the amount of penalty, is
known as the regularisation parameter. A small value for k means
the data can be fit tightly without causing a large penalty; a large
value for k means a tight fit has to be sacrificed if it requires large
weights.
4.3.2. Selection of RBF network architecture
The selection of RBF network architecture consists of selecting
its center, spread and optimal weights. An intractable problem of-
ten met in RBF network applications is the choice of centers, which
affect the complexity and the performance of a network greatly. If
too few centers were used, the network may not be capable of gen-
erating a good approximation to the target function. However, with
too many centers the network may overfit the data and it may fit
misleading variations due to imprecise or noisy data. There are dif-
ferent learning strategies that can follow in the design of an RBF,
depending on how the centers of the radial basis functions of the
network are specified.
The learning method employed in the present work uses the
forward selection approach to determine the centers of RBF func-
tions. Forward selection [10,16] is a direct approach to control
model complexity and to select a subset of centers from a larger
set that consists of all the input samples. The input data vectors
in the training set were used as the candidate centers. The method
starts with an empty network and then adds one neuron at a time
to the hidden layer, which is an incremental operation.
Using forward selection approach, the candidate unit, which de-
been selected at each step is chosen to be added to the current net-
work. When the error of network output reaches the pre-set error
goal value in conventional RBF network the procedure of adding
hidden neurons will stop. With the improved method, to decide
when to stop adding further neuron, the generalized cross-valida-
late the prediction error during the training procedure and is
^T P 2 y
py ^
^2GCV ¼
r ð16Þ
ðtraceðPÞÞ2
where P is projection matrix and p is the number of data sample in
training the network This is a quantity to estimate how well the
The learning process undertaken by RBF network consists of
supervised adjustment of nonlinear parameters, i.e. center and
1996 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998

Table 1 strong responses to some of the samples in order to differentiate

Selection of radius of basis function (k = 5  10E06) them.
Serial Radius Number of basis function Mean squared error on There are various heuristics for calculating the radius of RBF,
no. selected selected test data however, in the present work the MSE is used as a criterion for
1 2 67 0.1988 investigating the effect of radius of hidden neurons. The MSE does
2 3 24 0.1356 not monotonously decrease or increase with the increase of the ra-
3 4 20 0.1278 dii, but there is a value or range of radii at which the MSE is min-
4 5 16 0.0322
5 6 16 0.0968
imum [17]. It can be seen from Table 1, that the mean squared
6 6.5 25 0.19 error on test data is increasing and decreasing in the radius range
7 7 12 0.0021 of 2–6.5, however; in the range of 7–9 of radii the MSE is found to
8 7.5 11 0.0024 be falling near its minimum. With this analysis, 12 number of ra-
9 8 17 0.073
dial basis function of radius 7 with regularization parameter equal
10 9 20 0.073
to 5  10E06 is selected in this application. With this network
configuration, optimal weights have been obtained by minimizing
the performance function given by Eq. (15).
shape of receptive field, as well as linear parameter, i.e. weights of
the output layer. Total 900 data were used for the training and 300 5. Results and discussion
data are kept for testing the network. Initially training is performed
without any subset selection, i.e. with simple RBF network, and The FEGT is predicted for 300 test data using MLP and RBF type
with this the MSE is found to be very high. With forward selection neural network implemented in MATLAB. Test data are first nor-
and small regularization k = 5  10E06, much smaller mean malized between 0.9 to+0.9 and later denormalized back to its
square error equal to 0.0021 is found and only12 basis function exact value for comparison with actual FEGT value.
are selected. In back-propagation algorithm, neural network with nine in-
The next step in the training process involves the computation puts, one hidden layer with five hidden neurons and one output
of the Gaussian function width/radius. Radius reflects the size of neuron is employed for predicting FEGT. The activation function
the RBF unit, and thus affects the response of the network to an ‘tan-sigmoid’ is selected for hidden neurons and linear function
input directly. The effect of radius on RBF network performance is employed for output neuron. Back-propagation training using
was investigated in the present work. With small radii, the re- the Lavenberg–Marquadrt training algorithm with learning rate
sponses of networks are weak to all the samples because the hid- of 0.01 is used for training the network. MLP network predicted va-
den neurons are so narrow that most of the samples are far from lue and actual value of FEGT is plotted for set of 300 data as shown
the center. While relatively larger radii networks will give out in Fig. 9.

Fig. 9. Predicted FEGT using back-propagation algorithm

Fig. 10. Predicted FEGT using radial basis function (FEGT)

 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998
Similarly, in the case of RBF network the number of basis func-
tion selected by forward selection supervised learning is 12. The
Fig. 11. Correlation of actual and predicted FEGT using MLP network.
Fig. 12. Correlation of actual and predicted FEGT using RBF.
Fig. 13. FEGT error using MLP network using back-propagation.
1997
radius of basis function and the regularization parameter are
important for RBF performance and selected experimentally as 7
and 5  10E06, respectively. RBF network predicted value and
actual value of FEGT is plotted for set of 300 data as shown in
Fig. 10.
5.1. Comparison of two networks
As MLP and RBF type neural networks initialize and train in dif-
ferent ways, a direct comparison is not straightforward. However,
they can be compared based on ease of model building, prediction
accuracy and network simplicity.
The major parameters which influence training and prediction
performance of MLP networks includes training time and number
of neurons in the hidden layer. The choice of these two parameters
is crucial and complex in MLP model building. Methods such as
cross-validation have been used to monitor and reduce the training
time by examination of mean squared error for prediction (MSEP).
Models with minimum MSEP are considered adequate. Also be-
cause of the random initialization of weights and bias in MLP net-
work, they will not necessarily yield the same result when
repeated and it is very difficult to conclude, which configuration
is better. In contrast, initialization of weights in the RBF network
with forward selection by minimizing the MSEP, always results
in the same performance for a particular set of parameters. Model
building in RBF network is therefore easier as compared to MLP
network in this case.
The prediction accuracy of two feed forward networks is com-
pared by computing mean square error (MSE) on test data set.
The predicted FEGT using MLP network and RBF network as shown
in Figs. 9 and 10 results in MSE of 0.0030 and 0.0021, respectively.
The correlation coefficient is also calculated for both cases and
found to be 0.982 and 0.985 for MLP and RBF networks, respec-
tively as shown in Figs. 11 and 12. This indicates that RBF is com-
paratively better in approximating the actual FEGT.
Another attempt was made to compare the performance be-
tween the RBF and MLP networks by plotting FEGT prediction er-
rors against counts. Bar charts of Figs. 13 and 14 indicate that
FEGT prediction error is within 7 to +7 for almost all the counts
in the case of RBF network, whereas for the MLP network it is more
wider and in the range of 10 to +10.
In terms of network simplicity, the number of processing units
in RBF network is more than twice of the MLP network. However,
1998 J.S. Chandok et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1989–1998
Fig. 14. FEGT error using radial basis function network.
RBF network trains much more rapidly as compared to MLP net-
work. A proper selection of spread parameter is crucial to the gen-
eration of good global model for the type of data used.
6. Conclusions
This study presents a novel neural network based approach to
estimate FEGT for operator information. The major emphasis in
this study is on how to make FEGT estimate more reliable and use-
ful to the operator. Various important parameters, which are di-
rectly or indirectly related to FEGT, have been logically selected
as input variables based on operator experience and process
knowledge to ensure reliable estimation. Prediction accuracy and
faster response are major concerns in using neural network in esti-
mating FEGT for useful operator information: therefore two types
of feed forward neural modeling networks, radial basis function
and back-propagation network, were applied and compared based
on their network simplicity, model building and prediction
accuracy.
It has been shown that, for this application, RBF networks train
very rapidly (about 10 times faster than MLP networks using back-
propagation algorithm). A proper selection of the spread parameter
is crucial to the generation of a good global model for the type of
data used in this study, but both the spread parameter and the
number of neurons in the hidden layer were easily optimized by
forward selection method. In general the FEGT predictions of both
MLP and RBF networks are very similar, i.e. the results show that
both networks converged to the same performance in terms of pre-
diction output, provided that care was taken to ensure that the net-
work was optimized.
The inference and conclusions drawn from the study will con-
tribute to development of useful soft-sensors for FEGT. This online
measurement of FEGT can be directly linked with existing distrib-
uted digital control and information system, for control and infor-
mation in existing power plants. The FEGT available by this means
will also be useful for various boiler optimization software viz. boi-
ler plant optimization systems, intelligent soot blowing system
and study of heat rate improvement.
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