Performance evaluation of circulating fluidized bed incineration of municipal solid waste by multivariate outlier detection in China

Highlights

Reducing load change frequency is more important than magnitude for performance.

Overloading is more often than underloading. The frequent overloading is 0% to 30%.

Heterogeneous property of MSW can be magnified by the frequent load changes.

Appropriate MSW storage capacity may buffer and reduce the frequency of load change.

Abstract

This first nationwide survey was conducted to evaluate the overall performance of the circulating fluidized bed (CFB) incineration of municipal solid waste (MSW) in 2014-2015 in China. Total 23 CFB incineration power plants were evaluated. The data for monthly average flue gas emission of particles, CO, NO_x, SO₂ and HCl were collected over 12 consecutive months. The data were analyzed to assess the overall performance of CFB incineration by applying the Mahalanobis distance as a multivariate outlier detection method. Although the flue gas emission parameters had met the Chinese national emission standards, there were 11 total outliers (abnormal behavior) detected in 6 out of 23 CFB incineration power plants from the perspective of the MSW incineration performance. The results demonstrate that it is more important for a better performance of CFBs to reduce the frequencies of the MSW load changes, rather than the magnitudes of the MSW load changes, particularly reducing the frequencies in the range of 10% and more of the load changes, under the same and stable conditions. Furthermore, the overloading occurs more often than the underloading during the operation of the CFB incineration power plants in China. The frequent overloading is 0% to 30% of the designed capacity. To achieve the stable performance of CFBs in practice, an appropriately designed MSW storage capacity is suggested to build in a plant to buffer and reduce the frequency of the load changes.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Municipal solid waste / Incineration / Circulating fluidized bed / Load change / Multivariate outlier detection

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Chinese colleagues, members of China Association of Urban Environmental Sanitation (CAUES), and Tian Yu to offer the data and assistance for this study.

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2017 Higher Education Press and Springer–Verlag Berlin Heidelberg