The new challenges on advanced process control raised by large-scale grinding equipment

In recent years, the trend in large-scale equipment of grinding classification process becomes increasingly common in metallurgical plant. This trend raised the new requirement of much higher efficiency and performance precision in large-scale griding process. Taking into account the peculiarity of strong disturbances and wide operation range in most of domestic concentration plant, several practical and feasible advanced process control strategies have been analyzed in this paper. A anti-disturbance based multivariable composite control method is proposed for large-scale grinding process. An improved disturbance observer is constructed for time-delay process, which is combined with model predictive control to enhance the disturbance rejection performance and multivariable decoupling ability. Based on the models developed in different operation points, the multi-model switching control strategy is also proposed to improve the adaption performance against different operation conditions, which eventually the control accuracy of the product particle size.