Unburnt carbon estimation through flame image and gauss process regression

The presence of unburned carbon in coal-burning systems undoubtedly causes a loss in the amount of energy that can be obtained from the system, and also reveals an inadequacy in terms of the usability of the ashes. The expensiveness of existing unburned carbon prediction methods is one of the reasons why these technologies cannot be used. This situation requires working on alternative non-combustible carbon technologies. In this paper, a new approach is presented for estimating unburned carbon in a small-scale coal burner system using the Gaussian regression model and CCD camera-acquired flame image. The proposed approach evaluates brightness, fluctuation amplitude, area, and radiation signal properties of the flame image. The proposed non-combustible carbon estimation technique does not require prior knowledge of CCD camera features. In the feature acquisition phase, results were obtained for each natural component of the flame image in RGB colour space separately, in pairs, all together and for three artificial colour channels (grey image). With the proposed method, the unburned carbon estimation was obtained with an accuracy of R = 0.9664 when all colour channels of the RGB image were used together. This result shows that unburned carbon can be estimated from the instantaneous flame images obtained with the CCD camera.