Diagnosis for monitoring system of municipal solid waste incineration plant

Monitoring system plays an important role in supervising municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration plant. But little is known about the ways to assess its efficiency. This study aimed at developing a diagnosis tool for examining whether MSW incineration plant is under a reliable monitoring. Performances on status monitor, state assessment, data complement, and risk detection were step by step examined during diagnosis. Several data mining technologies composed of cluster analysis, artificial neural networks (ANNs), and Monte-Carlo simulation were adopted to fulfill this job. In a case study of MSW incineration plant located at South Taiwan, results showed no monitoring item within its monitoring system could be verified as relative to the emissions of Dust, CO, and SOx. In addition, data deficiencies severely affected its reliability. Except Dust, data deficiencies on monitoring NOx, CO, and SOx were more than 30%. So this monitoring system can do a good status monitor on Dust emission and provide a precise state assessment on steam generation and NOx control, but it really faced a problem on handling other air pollutants like CO and SOx. Through this diagnosis, we can get more deep insights about this monitoring system. Moreover it made us easily figure out the upgrading priority of the monitoring system. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.