A novel approach based on fuzzy-GA modeling for online measurement of fouling in steam condenser

A novel approach based on fuzzy-GA modeling for online measurement of fouling in steam condenser is proposed in this paper. In the approach, terminal temperature difference is chosen to reflect fouling state, fuzzy modeling is applied to separate the influence imposed by fouling on terminal temperature difference from other factors. During fuzzy modeling, T-S model is employed to approximate off-design condition terminal temperature difference, a fuzzy clustering algorithm based on similarity assessing is proposed to determine the optimal structure of the model and real-coded genetic algorithm (GA) is adopted to optimize model parameters. All these techniques make the fuzzy model compact and accurate. Based on it, an experimental system is developed and experiment on an actual steam condenser is carried out. The results show the approach measures the fouling correctly, and is more effective than thermal resistance method or heat transfer coefficient method.