This paper presents a small and efficient model for predicting NOx emissions from coal-fired boilers. The raw data collected are processed by the min–max scale method and converted into a multivariate time series. The overall model’s architecture is mainly based on building blocks consisting of separable convolutional neural networks and efficient channel attention (ECA) modules. The experimental results show that the model can learn good representations from sufficient data covering different operation conditions. These results also suggest that ECA modules can improve the model’s performance. The comparative study shows our model’s strong performance compared to other NOx prediction models. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper in terms of predicting NOx emissions.

In this paper, a novel model with a parallel structure is proposed to predict NO x emissions from coal-fired boilers by using historical operational data, coal properties, and convolutional neural networks. The model inputs are processed and passed into three parallel subnetworks with well-designed building blocks. The features learned by the three subnetworks are fused and used to predict NO x emissions from a 330-MW pulverized coal-fired utility boiler. A comprehensive comparison of different prediction models based on deep learning algorithms shows that the prediction model proposed in this paper outperforms other prediction models in terms of root mean square error criteria. The results show that the parallel structure is key to obtaining accurate predictions while reducing model complexity. This suggests that the model's performance can be improved by designing the model architecture.