Calibration-free temperature monitoring of pulverized coal powder based on the dual-mode acoustic tomography.

Accurate temperature measurement of the pulverized coal powder is crucial in detecting and preventing coal spontaneous combustion. Compared to other temperature measurement techniques, acoustic tomography using low frequency sound waves has the advantage of high penetration ability for non-intrusive temperature measurement inside the pulverized coal powder. Additionally, by employing an array of acoustic transducers mounted around the coal powder, the entire sensing area can be covered, enabling a comprehensive temperature distribution analysis through tomographic reconstructions. However, the main drawback of the acoustic temperature measurement is the model complexity in describing the dependence of acoustic sound speed on temperature in the porous pulverized coal powder. Accurate calibration is required to determine the model parameters for temperature retrieval, however, which is difficult for in situ industrial application. To solve this problem, we proposed a calibration-free temperature monitoring method based on the dual-mode acoustic tomography for pulverized coal. The three-parameter JCAL model is used to characterize the acoustic propagation in coal powder. The temperature and micro-structure parameters can be jointly retrieved from the reconstructed sound slowness and attenuation distributions at different frequencies. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated in the simulation study. Results show that the dual-mode acoustic tomography can provide calibration-free simplicity for pulverized coal temperature measurement, which has a great potential for industrial applications. [Display omitted] • A calibration-free temperature measurement technique for pulverized coal. • 3-parameter JCAL model is used to characterize acoustic property of coal powder. • Multi-frequency dual-mode acoustic tomography is used for data acquisition. • Jointly retrieval of temperature and micro-structure parameters. • Good qualitative accuracy in imaging the temperature distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]