Real Time Control Method Based on Fuzzy Logic for Autogenous Mill Power

With the inherent disturbances related to the grindability of the materials to be ground, the fluctuation of feed size and the size distribution, the grinding conditions of an autogenous mill vary greatly. In addition, the complex dynamics, nonlinearity and time variance of the grinding process render the conventional control techniques such as PED control difficult to adapt to the power behavior drift of the autogenous mill, and the disturbances can´t be suppressed in time. In this paper, a novel method to control the autogenous mill power is proposed to improve both the system performance and adaptability. By using a predictive control approach as reference, a real time control algorithm is proposed to determine the control increment for the next control step according to the current output error, error change and desired trajectory of the output variable, and a fuzzy controller is designed to tune the algorithm parameter online. Simulation and experimental results show that favorable control performance can be achieved by using the proposed strategy.