There are many factors affecting the combustion process in incinerators; one of them is how to control the temperature of the incineration and reduce the emissions. In this work, a second-order model of the adaptive fuzzy control strategy is adopted to stabilize the combustion temperature and the results demonstrate that the adaptive control strategy with the adaptive factors is a good method to achieve the goal of incineration temperature control. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.