Prediction of Superheated Steam Temperature in Thermal Power Plants Based on the iTransformer Model

Accurate prediction of superheated steam temperature (SST) is critical for the safe and efficient operation of large-scale thermal power units, particularly under large load variations and high thermal inertia. This study proposes an iTransformer-based SST prediction framework (iTransformer-SST) to address limitations of conventional proportional–integral–derivative (PID) control and existing data-driven models in capturing multivariable coupling, time-delay effects, and physical consistency. Using the A-side subsystem of a 1000 MW thermal power unit, 19-dimensional process data were collected continuously over two months with a sampling interval of 2.4 s. After data preprocessing, time-lagged cross-correlation (TLCC) analysis combined with expert knowledge was employed for feature screening, resulting in ten highly relevant input variables. To enhance predictive robustness, the baseline iTransformer was augmented with a Local Temporal Convolution (LTC) module for local disturbance modeling and a physics-guided regularization term to enforce delayed monotonicity and smoothness constraints. In 240 min rolling forecasts of the final-stage superheater outlet temperature, the proposed model achieved a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0887, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.2312, and a coefficient of determination ($R^2$) of 0.9650, significantly outperforming long short-term memory (LSTM), Informer, and the baseline iTransformer. The combined LTC and physics-guided design reduced MSE by 13.5%, demonstrating strong potential for feedforward-assisted SST control in industrial thermal power applications.