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-System failures in thermal power plants (TPPs) can lead to serious losses because the equipment is operated under very high pressure and temperature. Therefore, it is indispensable for alarm systems to inform field workers in advance of any abnormal operating conditions in the equipment. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based fault detection method for steam boiler tubes in TPPs. For data clustering, k-means algorithm is employed and the number of clusters are systematically determined by slope statistic. In the clustering-based method, it is assumed that normal data samples are close to the centers of clusters and those of abnormal are far from the centers. After partitioning training samples collected from normal target systems, fault scores (FSs) are assigned to unseen samples according to the distances between the samples and their closest cluster centroids. Alarm signals are generated if the FSs exceed predefined threshold values. The validity of exponentially weighted moving average to reduce false alarms is also investigated. To verify the performance, the proposed method is applied to failure cases due to boiler tube leakage. The experiment results show that the proposed method can detect the abnormal conditions of the target system successfully.

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In the manufacturing processes, process optimization tasks, to optimize their product quality, can be performed through the following procedures. First, process models mimicking functional relationships between quality characteristics and controllable factors are constructed. Next, based on these models, objective functions formulating process optimization problems are defined. Finally, optimization algorithms are applied for finding solutions for these functions. It is important to note that different solutions can be found whenever these algorithms are independently executed if a unique solution does not exist; this may cause confusion for process operators and engineers. This paper proposes a confidence interval (CI)-based process optimization method using second-order polynomial regression analysis. This method evaluates the quality of the different solutions in terms of the lengths of their CIs; these CIs enclose the outputs of the regression models for these solutions. As the CIs become narrower, the uncertainty about the solutions decreases (i.e., they become statistically significant). In the proposed method, after sorting the different solutions in ascending order, according to the lengths, the first few solutions are selected and recommended for the users. To verify the performance, the method is applied to a process dataset, gathered from a ball mill, used to grind ceramic powders and mix these powders with solvents and some additives. Simulation results show that this method can provide good solutions from a statistical perspective; among the provided solutions, the users are able to flexibly choose and use proper solutions fulfilling key requirements for target processes.

Electric load forecasting is indispensable for the effective planning and operation of power systems. Various decisions related to power systems depend on the future behavior of loads. In this paper, we propose a new input selection procedure, which combines the group method of data handling (GMDH) and bootstrap method for support vector regression based hourly load forecasting. To construct the GMDH network, a learning dataset is divided into training and test datasets by bootstrapping. After constructing GMDH networks several times, the inputs that appeared frequently in the input layers of the completed networks were selected as the significant inputs. Filter methods based on linear correlation and mutual information (MI) were employed as comparison methods, and the performance of hybrids of the filter methods and the proposed method were also confirmed. In total, five input selection methods were compared. To verify the performance of the proposed method, hourly load data from South Korea was used and the results of one-hour, one-day and one-week-ahead forecasts were investigated. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method has higher prediction accuracy compared with the filter methods. Among the five methods, a hybrid of an MI-based filter with the proposed method shows best prediction performance.