Fuzzy controller design for municipal incinerators with the aid of geneticalgorithms and genetic programming techniques

Mass burn waterwall incinerator has been the most widely used technology fo r processing the municipal solid waste (MSW) streams in many metropolitan r egions since 1970. Not only the heterogeneity of physical composition and c hemical property of the MSW but also the complexity of combustion mechanism would significantly influence the performance of waste incineration. As a result, a successful operation requires an advanced combustion control syst em for handling many uncertain factors. Conventional automatic combustion c ontrol (ACC) technology was found to be insufficient to handle such a highl y nonlinear system. The successful applications of those intelligent combus tion control (ICC) technologies, such as fuzzy control technology, for redu cing the operational risk have received wide attention in recent years. Thi s paper illustrates the principles, algorithms, and application potentials of the genetic fuzzy controller that is particularly designed for improving the traditional fuzzy control logic with the aid of genetic algorithms/gen etic programming techniques. Practical implementation of this methodology w as assessed by a simulation analysis based on three representative types of mass burn waterwall incinerators in Taiwan. It indicates that the quality of combustion control in those three municipal incinerators can be possibly enhanced via the use of genetic fuzzy control logic. The application of su ch a hybrid fuzzy control technology can be easily extended to many other t ypes of industrial incinerators, such as modular, rotary kiln, and fluidize d bed incinerators, by a slightly different approach.