The furnace process is very important in boiler operation,and furnace pressure works as an important parameter in furnace process.Therefore,there is a need to analyze and monitor the pressure signal in furnace.However,little work has been conducted on the relationship with the pressure sequence and boiler’s load under different working conditions.Since pressure sequence contains complex information,it demands feature extraction methods from multi-aspect consideration.In this paper,fuzzy c-means analysis method based on weighted validity index(VFCM)has been proposed for the working condition classification based on feature extraction.To deal with the fluctuating and time-varying pressure sequence,feature extraction is taken as nonlinear analysis based on entropy theory.Three kinds of entropy values,extracted from pressure sequence in time-frequency domain,are studied as the clustering objects for work condition classification.Weighted validity index,taking the close and separation degree into consideration,is calculated on the base of Silhouette index and Krzanowski-Lai index to obtain the optimal clustering number.Each time FCM runs,the weighted validity index evaluates the clustering result and the optimal clustering number will be obtained when it reaches the maximum value.Four datasets from UCI Machine Learning Repository are presented to certify the effectiveness in VFCM.Pressure sequences got from a 300 MW boiler are then taken for case study.The result of the pressure sequence case study with an error rate of 0.5332%shows the valuable information on boiler’s load and pressure sequence in furnace.The relationship between boiler’s load and entropy values extracted from pressure sequence is proposed.Moreover,the method can be considered to be a reference method for data mining in other fluctuating and time-varying sequences.
