Prediction of nitrogen oxides from coal combustion by using response surface methodology

In this paper, NO_x emission prediction was studied. A simple model based on response surface methodology (RSM) was first put forward. Response surface models are multivariate polynomial models. Four RSM models were tried. The predicted NO_x emission was compared with the measured ones. The RSM model with quadratic terms showed the best agreement with the measurement, and had the mean relative error of 1.6719%. The frequency of those samples whose relative error is less than 5% was 96.8610%. The RSM model was simpler than the non-analytic models such as generalized regression neural network and support vector regression. The present study will be an alternative to developing predictive emissions monitoring systems (PEMS).