Modelling of a post-combustion CO2 capture process using deep belief network

This paper presents a study on using deep learning for the modelling of a post-combustion CO 2 capture process. Deep learning has emerged as a very powerful tool in machine learning. Deep learning technique includes two phases: an unsupervised pre-training phase and a supervised back-propagation phase. In the unsupervised pre-training phase, a deep belief network (DBN) is pre-trained to obtain initial weights of the subsequent supervised phase. In the supervised back-propagation phase, the network weights are fine-tuned in a supervised manner. DBN with many layers of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) can extract a deep hierarchical representation of training data. In terms of the CO 2 capture process, the DBN model predicts CO 2 production rate and CO 2 capture level using the following variables as model inputs: inlet flue gas flow rate, CO 2 concentration in inlet flue gas, pressure of flue gas, temperature of flue gas, lean solvent flow rate, MEA concentration and temperature of lean solvent. A greedy layer-wise unsupervised learning algorithm is introduced to optimize DBN, which can bring better generalization than a single hidden layer neural network. The developed deep architecture network models can then be used in the optimisation of the CO 2 capture process.