SIMULATION OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE GASIFICATION PROCESSES

USING NEURAL NETWORKS

Daya Shankar Pandey*, James J. Leahy*, Witold Kwapinski*

*Carbolea Research Group, Chemical and Environmental Science Department, University of

Limerick, Ireland, Contact: Daya.Pandey@ul.ie

Abstract
In this paper, a feed forward neural network (FFNN) is used to simulate a fluidized bed
gasifier. These artificial neural networks (ANNs) with different architectures are trained
using the back-propagation algorithm and K-fold cross validation is performed to ensure that
the results generalize to other unseen data. The developed ANN model has been trained
validated and tested against published experimental data. Model selection procedures are
carried out and it is found that the best models predict the lower heating value of the syngas
and gas yield successfully. The results show that the ANN based methodology is a viable
alternative for the problem of biomass gasification.

Keywords: Municipal solid waste, Gasification, Artificial neural networks, Fluidized bed
gasifier

1. Introduction:
Bioenergy from biomass and biowaste is playing a crucial role to achieve the EU 2020
targets. It is currently provides just under 2/3 of the renewable energy in the EU and expected
to account more than half the EU’s renewable energy in 2020 and about 13% of the total EU
energy consumption (Eurostat, 2015). However, comprehensive actions are still needed to
foster the development of advanced biofuel conversion technology to ensure their
sustainability and to commercialise biofuels based on lignocellulose and other non-food
feedstocks. The EU recognises that Europe has limited biomass and land resources to cope
with an increased demand for fuels and other uses. Therefore, in the longer term new
technologies for sustainable and alternative biofuels need to be developed that radically
improve the state-of-art specifically with respect to improving conversion efficiency and
enlargement of the biomass feedstock basis.

In urban areas there are significant environmental problems arising from the disposal of
municipal solid wastes (MSW) which have led to major concerns regarding human health and
environment. These issues are common to both the EU as well as in developing countries
(Pires et al., 2011). Therefore, it is necessary to develop new treatment technologies to meet
these global challenges. Since recent European legislation is trying to enforce a sustainable
development strategy (EU, 2009), there are good reasons why MSW should be addressed by
thermal treatment. There are several processes that could dispose MSW including thermal,
biochemical and mechanical processes. Incineration technology was widely used to process
MSW, but the control of NOx, SOx, nano-particle, dioxins and furans emissions were
challenging (Cheng and Hu, 2010). Thermal treatment technologies for the MSW have been
extensively reviewed by (Arena, 2012; Leckner, 2014; Lombardi et al., 2014; Malkow,
2004) and it was proposed that an alternative to combustion is to gasify the MSW for the
energy recovery. Thermal gasification provides flexibility for the production of heat and
power based on a clean biomass derived syngas. In addition, it preserves the environment by
reducing the amount of wastes to be landfilled by 85-90%. The syngas from MSW can be
used for heating and production of electricity to offset the use of fossil fuels.

A comprehensive review of fluidized bed biomass gasification models were presented by

(Gómez-Barea and Leckner, 2010). The gasification models were mainly categorised in
thermodynamic equilibrium, kinetic rate, fluid-dynamics, neural network and genetic
programming models (Pandey et al., 2015; Puig-Arnavat et al., 2010). Recently, ANN
technique has been applied in the gasification area and it has shown better results compared
to the conventional mathematical approach. Commented [WK1]: where is it showed?

ANN based predictive model was developed for predicting the product yield and gas
composition in an atmospheric steam blown biomass fluidized bed gasifier (Guo et al., 2001).
It was concluded that the feed forward neural network (FFNN) model has better accuracy
over the traditional regression models. A FFNN model was employed to predict the lower
hearting value of MSW based on its chemical composition (Dong et al., 2003). ANN was
applied for predicting the gasification characteristics of MSW (Xiao et al., 2009) and tested it
feasibility. Two different kind of ANN based date-driven models have been developed for the
prediction of gas production rate and heating value of the gas in coal gasifiers (Chavan et al.,
2012). Recently, ANN based predictive tool have been presented in a fluidized bed gasifiers
to predict the syngas composition and gas yield (Puig-Arnavat et al., 2013). However,
simulation of these MSW processes are computationally expensive and fast meta-models are
required to integrate these models into other systems level models which look at the whole
value chain to conduct life cycle analysis or other system level optimisation procedures.
 2. An overview of the Artificial neural networks modelling
Artificial neural network (ANN) is a computational technique that imitates the behaviour of
the human brain. ANNs are universal approximators and their prediction is based on prior
available data. It is therefore commonly preferred by researchers over other theoretical and
empirical methods. In recent past, ANN technique have been extensively used by several
researchers in the fields of pattern recognition, signal processing, function approximation,
weather prediction and process simulations (Guo et al., 1997). The recent development and
potential application of ANN has drawn the attention of the researcher to apply the ANN
techniques in the process industry. However, still there are very few reports of the application
of ANN technique for modelling of biomass gasification. Figure 1Figure 1 is representing the
multi-layer feed-forward network architecture with input and output variables. It consists of
an input layer, hidden layers and the output layer. Each node (neuron) other than the input
nodes are equipped with a nonlinear function. Back propagation learning technique is being
used for training the network. Each neuron in the hidden layer

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the ANN model.

The artificial intelligence based modelling strategies such as ANN is data-driven and thus
can be used for the modelling of the gasification process. In this study, an artificial neural
network approach is presented for the prediction of the lower heating value and synthesis gas
production in a fluidised bed gasifier. The experimental data was obtained from the literature
(Xiao et al., 2009) for wood, paper, kitchen garbage, polyethylene plastic and textile and for
Hongkong municipal solid waste (Choy et al., 2004). The operations of an ANN are divided
in training or ″learning″ phase and a cross-validation phase. For checking the accuracies and Commented [WK2]: is there any difference between training
and learning from ANN point of view?
robustness of the model, the experimental datasets are divided in training (70%) and the
remaining (30%) for the validation and testing purposes. The input  xi  and output  yi 
parameters are normalized. A hyperbolic tangent sigmoid function (tansig), which is given by
e x  e x 1
f  x  and logarithmic sigmoid function (logsig) f  x   are used in the
e x  e x 1  e x
hidden layers. The Lavenberg-Marquardt back-propagation algorithm is used for minimising
the error between network output and target output.

In order to develop the ANN model, there are nine process parameters that have been used
as model inputs i.e. carbon ( x1 ,wt%), hydrogen ( x2 , wt%), nitrogen ( x3 , wt%), sulphur ( x4 ,

wt%), oxygen ( x5 , wt%), moisture content ( x6 , wt%), ash ( x7 , wt%), the temperature of the

gasifier ( x8 , T0C) and equivalence ratio ( x9 , ER). ER is defined as the ratio of actual air to
fuel ratio versus stoichiometric air to fuel ratio for complete combustion. The input

parameters are represented as an input vector xi   x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 , x5 , x6 , x7 , x8 , x9  and the

output variables are lower heating value (kJ/Nm3)  y1  and gas yield (Nm3/kg)  y2  .

3. Result and discussion

The Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) data-set are used for training of the two
multilayer neural networks model one for predicting the syngas yield and the other for the
lower heating value from the MSW gasification process in a fluidized bed gasifier. The input
and output values are normalized with respect to the maximum value, to ensure that all data
used for training of the network lie within a range of [0, 1]. Different sets of internal network
parameters are being used while training the ANN model viz. number of hidden layer,
number of neurons in the hidden layer and transfer function, learning rate etc. A detailed
study on the effect of internal parameters on the performance of back propagation networks
(Hornik et al., 1989) and the procedure involved in selecting the best network topology has
been described elsewhere (Maier and Dandy, 1998).
 3.1. Predictive capability of the ANN based model for the lower heating value
calculation
Figure 2Figure 2 depicts the convergence characteristic of the ANN model. It can be seen that
the mean square error (MSE) of the validation curve is remains contact after 7 iterations.
Also, it has found the best fitness at iteration 7 for predicting the lower heating value in this
particular case. The model was trained on trial and error basis to achieve the MSE of 0.001
with 15 neurons in a hidden layer. Increase or decrease of the neuron in the hidden layer
caused unrealistic problem and increases MSE due to over-fitting or under-fitting of the
network.

Figure 2. Convergence of the ANN model for the lower heating value calculation.
The correlation coefficient (R2) and MSE of training validation and testing datasets are
reported in Figure 3Figure 3 to predict the lower heating value of the syngas produced. Three
subplot of Figure 3Figure 3 show the experimental versus ANN based model predicted values
for the lower heating value calculation of the syngas generated from the MSW gasification
process. The R2 value endorsed the prediction capability of the model to predict the lower
heating value from the experimental datasets. The plots show that degree of agreement
between the experimental and predicted values for the training; validation and testing datasets
are very good. It is evident that most of the data-points lie on the straight line which indicates
an excellent performance of the developed model.

Figure 3. Prediction of lower heating value using the ANN model with R2 and RMSE on the
training, validation and the testing datasets.

3.2. Predictive capability of the ANN based model for the syngas yield calculation
The same strategy is used in this case as explained in the previous section 3.1. The
convergence characteristic of predicting the syngas yield production is shown in Figure 4. Field Code Changed
Figure 4. Convergence of the ANN model for the syngas yield calculation.
The convergence characteristic of predicting the syngas yield production is shown in Figure
4Figure 4. In this case tThe best fitness of the network is achieved in 10 iterations. The actual Formatted: Font: Not Bold, Check spelling and grammar

vs. model predicted of syngas yield value from the best MIMO model solution on training,
validation and testing are reported in Figure 5Figure 5. As explained in section 3.1, Figure Formatted: Font: Not Bold, Check spelling and grammar

5Figure 5 show the R2 and RMSE values for the syngas yield production. It can be observed Formatted: Font: Not Bold, Check spelling and grammar

that the generalisation and performance of the model is excellent. The evolved model has R2
values are close to 100% in all the three case i.e. training, validation and testing. Although,
similar modelling paradigm is used while predicting the lower heating value and syngas yield
moreover, model for syngas yield production has slightly better prediction accuracy over the
model for the lower heating value prediction.

Figure 5. Prediction of syngas yield using the ANN model with R2 and RMSE on the
training, validation and the testing datasets.
To conclude, ANN based models are useful in predicting the non-linear complex
phenomenon. It demonstrates the implicit behaviour of the ANN tool between input and
output datasets which can be exploited to simulate the complex processes such as
gasification, pyrolysis and combustion.

4. Conclusion
In this present study, the ANN based MIMO model (Levenberg-Marquardt training
algorithm) is proposed to predict the lower heating value and syngas yield production of the
municipal solid waste in a fluidized bed gasifier using their process parameters and elemental
composition. It is evident that the predictive capability of the proposed ANN model has a
good agreement with the experimental datasets. This indicates that ANN can be used to solve
the complex thermochemical processes. However, it could have performed better if more data
has been used for the training the network. The accuracy and performance of the developed
model (R2 ≈ 98% for lower heating value and ≈ 100% for syngas yield production) is
excellent in all the cases and RMSE is very small. The model has been tested using data from
an atmospheric fluidized bed gasifier. The first application of this new approach has given a
useful insight for equilibrium modelling however, calibration of the ANN model with more
data is recommended.

Simulation result of this study is very promising and can be employed in other field of
waste management. This simulation paradigm illustrates the usefulness of the proposed
model, its convergence time and error is likely to zero. As a result, future research work will
be extended to develop a more rigorous model to perform the sensitivity analysis of the input
parameters to determine the effect of input parameter while predicting gasification
characteristics of the municipal solid waste.

Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme
(Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-
2013/under REA grant agreement no [289887].

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