Prediction of Higher Heating Value of Solid Biomass Fuels Using Artificial Intelligence Formalisms

The higher heating value (HHV) is an important property defining the energy content of biomass fuels. A number of proximate and/or ultimate analysis based predominantly linear correlations have been proposed for predicting the HHV of biomass fuels. A scrutiny of the relationships between the constituents of the proximate and ultimate analyses and the corresponding HHVs suggests that all relationships are not linear and thus nonlinear models may be more appropriate. Accordingly, a novel artificial intelligence (AI) formalism, namely genetic programming (GP) has been employed for the first time for developing two biomass HHV prediction models, respectively using the constituents of the proximate and ultimate analyses as the model inputs. The prediction and generalization performance of these models was compared rigorously with the corresponding multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network based as also currently available high-performing linear and nonlinear HHV models. This comparison reveals that the HHV prediction performance of the GP and MLP models is consistently better than that of their existing linear and/or nonlinear counterparts. Specifically, the GP- and MLP-based models exhibit an excellent overall prediction accuracy and generalization performance with high (>0.95) magnitudes of the coefficient of correlation and low (