Failure to blow ash on the heated surface of the boiler
will cause
a drop in heat transfer rate and even industrial safety accidents.
Nowadays, the shortcomings of the fixed soot blowing operation every
hour and every shift are significant, which can be improved by high-precision
ash accumulation prediction. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep
learning model fused with deep feature extraction. First, a dynamic
fouling model and a health index-clearness factor (
CF
) of the heated surface are established. The data preprocessing method
reduces unnecessary forecasting difficulty and makes the degradation
trend of the
CF
time series more obvious. In addition,
deep feature extraction is composed of complete ensemble empirical
mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and kernel principal
component analysis (KPCA), which completes the multiscale analysis
of time series and reduces the training time of deep learning models,
and has significant contributions to improving prediction accuracy
and reducing time consumption. The adaptive sliding window and the
encoder–decoder based on the attention mechanism (EDA) can
better mine the internal information of the time series. Compared
with long short-term memory (LSTM), taking the 300 MW boiler’s
various heated surface data sets as an example, multistep forward
prediction and different starting point prediction experiments have
verified the superiority and effectiveness of the model. Finally,
under the variable working condition economizer datasets, the proposed
method better completes the predictive maintenance task of the heated
surface. The research results provide operational guidance for improving
heat transfer rate, energy saving, and reducing consumption.