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Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 692–696

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Applied Thermal Engineering


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

A multi-layer feed forward neural network model for accurate prediction of flue
gas sulfuric acid dew points in process industries
Bahman ZareNezhad *, Ali Aminian
School of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering, Semnan University, PO Box 35195-363 Semnan, Iran

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

Article history: Acidic combustion gases can cause rapid corrosion when they condense on pollution control or energy
Received 14 May 2009 recovery equipments. Since the potential of sulfuric acid condensation from flue gases is of considerable
Accepted 23 November 2009 economic significance, a multi-layer feed forward artificial neural network has been presented for accu-
Available online 26 November 2009
rate prediction of the flue gas sulfuric acid dew points to mitigate the corrosion problems in process and
power plants. According to the network’s training, validation and testing results, a three layer neural net-
Keywords: work with four neurons in the hidden layer is selected as the best architecture for accurate prediction of
Sulfuric acid
sulfuric acid dew points. The presented model is very accurate and reliable for predicting the acid dew
Flue gas
Heat recovery
points over wide ranges of sulfur trioxide and water vapor concentrations. Comparison of the suggested
Dew point neural network model with the most important existing correlations shows that the proposed neuromor-
Neural network phic model outperforms the other alternatives both in accuracy and generality. The predicted flue gas sul-
furic acid dew points are in excellent agreement with experimental data suggesting the accuracy of the
proposed neural network model for predicting the sulfuric acid condensation in stacks, pollution control
devices, economizers and flue gas recovery systems in process industries.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction droplets is formed which is highly detrimental to the stack and


heat recovery exchangers.
Whenever fossil fuels containing sulfur are fired in heaters or Significant efforts have been devoted for establishing methods to
boilers, sulfur dioxide, and to a small extent sulfur trioxide, are predict the sulfuric acid dew point of flue gases. A thermodynamic
formed in addition to water vapor. The SO3 combines with water approach has been used for predicting the sulfuric acid vapor/liquid
vapor in the flue gas to form sulfuric acid and condenses on heat equilibrium conditions [2,3]. However, the predicted results are
transfer surfaces, which could lead to corrosion and destruction proved to be quite sensitive to the accuracy of the data. Similar ap-
of the surfaces [1]. This condensation occurs on surfaces that are proaches have been presented [4–6] to describe complex vapor–li-
at or below the dew point of the acid gas. While thermal efficiency quid equilibrium behavior of aqueous sulfuric acid mixtures.
of the combustion equipment is increased with reduction in flue Unfortunately these models have made some simplifications and
gas temperature, lower temperatures than the sulfuric acid dew covered limited ranges of liquid sulfuric acid concentrations below
point are not advisable for metallic surfaces in contact with the 60 wt.%, while the acid concentration as high as 85–90 wt.% prevails
gas [2]. For example, if a combustion gas containing 10% water va- in flue gas recovery equipments. The available thermodynamic mod-
por by volume also contains as little as 40 ppmv sulfur trioxide, els [7] are not accurate enough for prediction of flue gas sulfuric acid
that gas has 0.22 weight percent of sulfuric acid (based on SO3 dew points regarding industrial applications.
and H2O alone). As soon as the temperature of such a mixture Verhoff and Banchero [8] provided an empirical fit of available
drops below 148 °C, liquid must form; and this powerfully acidic experimental data as a more accurate method for estimating dew
liquid will condense on any solid metallic and non-metallic sur- point conditions. However, there are some disagreements between
faces that are cool enough. The liquid phase in equilibrium with the experimental data and their correlation especially at low SO3
this gas has sulfuric acid concentration of 82.5% by weight at a concentrations and high H2O contents. The Verhoff and Banchero
dew point of 148 °C. Further, if the gas is cooled below this dew correlation is such that it does not reduce to the dew point of water
point by radiation and/or convection, a mist of corrosive acid at zero parts per million of SO3. This means that at some point the
equation must start yielding low results. Dew points predicted in
the range of 120–140 °C have a positive deviation of 4 °C and more.
Okkes [9] proposed a correlation to overcome some of the earlier
* Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +98 2313354120.
E-mail address: zarenezhad@aol.com (B. ZareNezhad). shortcomings. Although this correlation is more accurate at H2O

1359-4311/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2009.11.017
B. ZareNezhad, A. Aminian / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 692–696 693

Nomenclature

Oj output of the jth neuron TDew temperature, °C


I ith input signal to the jth neuron P H2 O partial pressure of H2O in the flue gas, MPa
F activation or transfer function PSO3 partial pressure of SO3 in the flue gas, MPa
bj bias of the jth neuron yH2 O concentration of H2O in the flue gas, vol.%
wji synaptic weight corresponding to ith synapse of jth neu- ySO3 concentration of SO3 in the flue gas, ppmv
ron R2 value correlation coefficient
x ith input signal to the jth neuron
n number of input signals to the jth neuron.

concentrations higher than 25%, but it significantly underpredicts bility, since it facilitates the training of the network through gradi-
the acid dew points at low H2O concentrations. ent-based training algorithms. The activation function serves
Since the potential of acid condensation from flue gases is of mainly as a type of filter or gate that lets some signals move for-
considerable economic significance, an artificial neural network ward and stops others as they progress from the input nodes to
model [10–13] is presented for accurate prediction of sulfuric acid the output nodes [12]. Thus, the smaller the value of the neuron’s
dew point at the operating conditions of stacks and heat recovery output is, the less its effect on the next neurons would be. In this
systems. study, the feed forward neural network is used for predicting the
sulfuric acid dew point of flue gases. Multi-layer feed forward net-
2. Neural network modeling work consists of group interconnected nodes arranged in layers
corresponding to input, hidden and output nodes [13] as shown
Neural networks are computational systems, either hardware or in Fig. 2.
software which mimics the computational abilities of biological Network has been trained and validated by using 70% and 15%
systems by using numbers of interconnected artificial neurons. A of a set of 300 sulfuric acid dew points, respectively, [14,15]. The
neural net consists of numbers of simple processing elements model predictions are also compared with 15% of data points not
called neurons. Each neuron of neural network is connected to oth- used in the model development. Thus the proposed model accu-
ers by means of direct communication link, each with an associ- racy is tested against 45 independent data points. The network
ated weight, which represents information being used by the net training has been carried out by Levenberg–Marquardt back prop-
to solve the problem as shown in Fig. 1. The output of a neuron agation algorithm. The tan-sigmoid activation function applied to
is computed from following equation [10]: calculate the output values of the neurons of the hidden layer gives
! the best result. A trial-and-error approach has been used to mini-
X
n mize the error in order to determine the optimal combination of
Oj ¼ f wji Ii þ bj ð1Þ number of hidden layers and number of neurons. The best perfor-
i¼1
mance is obtained when a network consists of three layers, with
where Oj = output of the jth neuron, f = activation or transfer func- two and four neurons in the input layer and the hidden layer,
tion, bj = bias of the jth neuron, wji = synaptic weight corresponding respectively and one neuron in the output layer is used. The opti-
to ith synapse of jth neuron, Ii = ith input signal to the jth neuron; mal network architecture for predicting the flue gas sulfuric acid
n = number of input signals to the jth neuron. dew point (output of the network) as a function of state variables
As Eq. (1) shows bias is an activation threshold added to the (input of the network), namely, the SO3 concentration (ppmv) and
product of input data and their respective weighting factors. The H2O concentration (vol.%) is shown in Fig. 3.
most commonly used activation or transfer functions that work The training result of the proposed feed forward network is dis-
well are logarithmic sigmoid, hyperbolic tangent sigmoid and lin- played in Fig. 4. As shown, there is a very good agreement between
ear functions [11]. Weighted sum of all input plus the bias of neu- the experimental data and the trained ones. The correlation coeffi-
ron will become the input of activation function. It should be noted cient (R2-value) is 0.9999, very close to 1, suggesting the accuracy
that an important characteristics of the activation is its differentia- of the network training. The optimum calculated values of network
parameters to be used in simulations are given in Tables 1 and 2.

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of neuron j and its links according to Eq. (1). Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of multi-layer feed forward neural network model.
694 B. ZareNezhad, A. Aminian / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 692–696

Fig. 3. Proposed three layer feed forward neural network model.

200 190
yH2O=30 vol% yH2O=25 vol%
180 yH2O=20 vol% yH2O=15 vol%
170 yH2O=10 vol% yH2O= 5 vol%
Trained T Dew (°C)

150
160 ….. Proposed model
TDew ( °C)

150
100
140
130

50 120
110
100
0 1 10 100 1000
0 50 100 150 200 ySO 3 (ppmv)
Experimental TDew ( °C)
Fig. 5. Comparison of the proposed neural network predictions with experimental
Fig. 4. Neural network training results for flue gas sulfuric acid dew point data at different H2O and SO3 concentrations.
temperature.

Table 1 Table 2
The optimum calculated values of network weights. The optimum calculated values of network biases.

2nd layer 3rd layer 2nd layer 3rd layer


2 3
w211 ¼ 0:1919 w212 ¼ 1:9302 w311 ¼ 0:000 b1 ¼ 2:9293 b1 ¼ 0:0593
2
w221 ¼ 0:3347 w222 ¼ 0:1821 w321 ¼ 2:5459 b2 ¼ 0:4558
w231 ¼ 3:5271 w232 ¼ 0:5924 w331 ¼ 0:0003 2
b3 ¼ 1:4799
w241 ¼ 0:3670 w242 ¼ 0:1994 w341 ¼ 2:1253 2
b4 ¼ 0:9171

3. Results and discussion over the SO3 range of 0.1–100 ppmv. As shown, the dew point tem-
perature does not fall off as quickly when SO3 concentrations are
Predicted and measured flue gas acid dew points are compared low. Thus the accurate prediction of acid dew points especially at
at different SO3 and H2O concentrations in Fig. 5. As shown, the low SO3 concentrations prevailing in oil and gas industries is crit-
acid dew point is very sensitive to the flue gas SO3 concentration ical to the design and operation of stacks, boilers and heat recovery
such that a small increase in SO3 concentration leads to a signifi- systems.
cant increase in acid dew point at a given H2O concentration. How- Many of the processes for increasing the efficiency of combined
ever, effect of H2O concentration on acid dew point is moderate cycle plants such as gas turbine inlet fogging can result in lower
especially at high SO3 concentrations. According to Figs. 5 and 6, ef- flue gas temperatures exiting the heat recovery steam generators
fect of SO3 concentration on acid dew point is much more sever and/or increased flue gas moisture content. The added moisture
B. ZareNezhad, A. Aminian / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 692–696 695

190
yH2O = 15 vol%
185 yH2O = 5 vol%
V.B correlation

TDew ( °C)
180 … Proposed model

175

170

165
0 100 200 300 400 500
ySO 3 (ppmv)

Fig. 7. Comparison of the proposed neural network model with Verhoff and
Banchero (VB) correlation and experimental data.

190

Fig. 6. Comparison of the predicted sulfuric acid dew points locus with experi- 180
mental data.
170

TDew ( °C)
160
will raise the water dew point temperature and may thus impact
allowable metal operating temperature. However, at H2O concen- 150
trations higher than 30 vol.%, the moisture content does not have yH2O = 15 vol%
a significant influence on the sulfuric acid dew point as shown in 140 yH2O = 5 vol%
Figs. 5 and 6. The predicted acid dew points by presented neural Okkes correlation
network are in good agreement with experimental data as shown 130 … Proposed model
in these figures. At a low SO3 concentration (below 100 ppmv),
120
the rate of change of acid dew point is very significant; while at
0 100 200 300 400 500
a high SO3 content, effect of SO3 content on acid dew point changes
is not so considerable.
ySO 3 (ppmv)
Effect of water content on acid dew point is more important at Fig. 8. Comparison of the proposed neural network model with Okkes correlation
low SO3 concentrations as shown in Figs. 5 and 6. At a low SO3 con- and experimental data.
centration of 1 ppmv, an increase of H2O concentration from 5 to
30 vol.% leads to a considerable increase (about 19.81%) in acid
dew point from 106 to 127 °C, while at a high SO3 content of in the model development are also compared against proposed
500 ppmv, the same H2O increment results in a small increase model predictions in Fig. 9. The overall correlation coefficient
(about 7.51%) in acid dew point from 173 to 186 °C. For wide (R2-value) of 0.9997 indicates a very good agreement between
ranges of SO3 (0.1–500 ppmv) and H2O (5–50 vol.%) contents, experimental and predicted acid dew points. As shown in this fig-
the presented neural network model accurately predicts the flue ure, the proposed neuromorphic model can be used for accurate
gas sulfuric acid dew points as shown in these figures. The pre-
sented dew points locus (shown as a surface in Fig. 6) clearly indi-
cates the trend of sulfuric acid dew point variations in term of the
200
SO3 and H2O concentrations and confirms the foregoing discussion
regarding the contribution of these two species on the flue gas sul-
furic acid dew points. At a flue gas temperature lower than that
shown on the presented locus, there is always the risk of corrosion
Predicted TDew ( °C)

150
failure due to sulfuric acid condensation.
The predicted acid dew points by the presented neuromorphic
model are compared with the predictions of Verhoff and Banchero
(VB) and Okkes correlations at different SO3 and H2O concentra- 100
tions in Figs. 7 and 8, respectively. As shown in these figures, it is
not possible to cover all experimental data by the aforementioned
correlations. The V.B correlation overpredicts the experimental 50
data; while the Okkes correlation underpredicts the acid dew
points significantly. The predicted dew points by the proposed
neural network model are in excellent agreement with measured
sulfuric acid dew points in all ranges of SO3 and H2O concentra- 0
tions as shown in these figures. 0 50 100 150 200
Predicted sulfuric acid dew points are compared with the afore- Experimental TDew ( °C)
mentioned set of experimental data points [14,15] over the SO3
concentration range of 0.1–500 ppmv and H2O contents of Fig. 9. Comparison between the proposed model predictions with measured
5–50 vol.% in Fig. 9. As discussed above, 45 data points not used sulfuric acid dew points.
696 B. ZareNezhad, A. Aminian / Applied Thermal Engineering 30 (2010) 692–696

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nian Gas Company during the preparation of the manuscript.

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