Abstract
The present study demonstrates the thermal behaviors of refuse-derived fuel (RDF), a highly-heterogeneous fuel, at high temperature region by bringing experimental and modelling studies together. In the first part, RDF was pyrolyzed in thermal analyzer from room temperature to 900 °C at varying heating rates as well as the evolved gas analysis was monitored by using TG-FTIR-MS. Afterwards, obtained data was used to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) model that can predict thermal behaviors of RDF at a new heating rate without performing any experiments. The temperature and heating rate were selected as input parameters while temperature dependent weight loss was selected as output parameter. The effects of parameters such as neuron number, training number, and the transfer function type on the network performance were investigated in detail to optimize network topology. Optimization studies showed that the best performance was achieved with ANN that had 7-6 neurons trained 25 times with tansig-logsig non-linear function combination. Prediction performance of the optimized ANN was tested by introducing a new experimental dataset. The good agreement between experimental and predicted values revealed that ANN can be a promising tool in pyrolytic behaviors estimation of even heterogeneous fuels such as RDF.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 84-94 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis |
Volume | 122 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
Funding
The authors would like to thank The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey for their financial support (TUBITAK 214M403 ) and Istanbul Technical University (ITU)-Scientific Research Project (BAP 39180 ). In addition, Kubilay Atalay, for his valuable contributions to this work, and the assistance of ISTAÇ Co. Compost and Recovery Plant for the provision of RDF as raw material as well as Anadolu University-Carbonaceous Materials Processing Group for their kind assistance in TG-FTIR-MS studies are also acknowledged gratefully by the authors.
Funders | Funder number |
---|---|
Scientific Research Project | BAP 39180 |
TUBITAK | 214M403 |
Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştirma Kurumu | |
Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi |
Keywords
- Artificial neural network (ANN)
- Characterization
- Prediction
- Pyrolysis
- RDF
- TGA