CORSA - CO2 Reduzierung in Verbrennungsprozessen durch selbstoptimierende Systeme am Beispiel einer Sonder-Abfallverbrennungsanlage


 

The hazardous waste incineration is a process, where solid, pasty, and liquid hasardous waste, delivered in various packagings, are fed discontinuously into a rotary kiln, where they are burned at a temperature between 1100 and 1200 °C. In the case of hazardous waste with very low heating value it becomes necessary, to burn additionaly light fuel oil, in order to keep the properties of the combustion process, despite of the discontinuous waste insertion, as constant as possible. The released energy of this process is also used to produce district heat. For the combustion process itself and the succeeding waste gas cleaning many rigorous requirements to ensure environmental protection have to be met (this plant produces about 250.000 t carbon dioxide a year!). Because of the different and also time varying heating values of the discontinuously incoming waste material there exists up to now no automatic system to control this complex process. Hence, the plant operator controls the combustion manually, which is save with respect to the environmental requirements, but is unfortunately often suboptimal concerning the efficiency factor of the district heat production.

Therefore, the main goal ouf our research project is, to use a special video recording technique to directly observe the interior of the rotary kiln. Based on this new and valuable information we plan to develope a learning and self-optimizing approach to control the combustion process with respect to both system goals: compliance with the environmental requirements on one hand and increase of the efficiency factor on the other hand. The main focus of the TU Ilmenau is the second part: realizing the information processing of the visual data to extract process relevant features that describe the internal state of the rotary kiln and finally their usage to control and optimize the complex industrial process.