Data-driven autonomous operation of VOCs removal system

Abstract

Removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air has been an important issue in many industrial fields. Traditionally, the operation of VOCs removal systems has relied on fixed operating conditions determined by domain experts based on their expertise and intuition. In practice, this manual operation cannot respond immediately to changes in the system environment. To facilitate the autonomous operation of the system, the operating conditions should be optimized properly in real time to adapt to the changes in the system environment. Recently, optimization frameworks have been widely applied to real-world industrial systems across various domains using different approaches. The primary motivation for this study is the effective implementation of an optimization framework targeting a VOCs removal system. In this paper, we present a data-driven autonomous operation method for optimizing the operating conditions of a VOCs removal system to enhance the overall performance. An optimization problem is formulated with the decision variables denoting the parameters associated with the operating condition, the environmental variables representing the measurements for the system environment, the constraints specifying the control ranges of the parameters, and the objective function representing the system performance as determined by the operating conditions and environment. Using the previous operation data from the system, a neural network is trained to model the system performance as a function of the decision and environmental variables to approximate the objective function. For the current state of the system environment, the optimal operating condition is derived by solving the optimization problem. A case study of a targeted VOCs removal system demonstrates that the proposed method effectively optimizes the operating conditions for improved system performance without intervention from domain experts.