Alumina Continuous Carbonation Process Expert Control System Design And Software Development

Continuous carbonation decomposition (CCD) is one of the key procedures in sintering process of alumina production, its decomposition ratio gradient and the last-tank decomposition ratio directly affect the quality and yield of products. It is a nonlinear and complex industrial process with strong coupling and large time-delay, so the application of traditional control methods for it is too difficult to meet the requirements, moreover there is great labor intensity for worker to adjust and control it artificially. In order to improve product quality and reduce labor intensity, it is very important to develop an automatic control system of the process.Based on the analysis of main influencing factors of the CCD process and long-term experts' experience, a control strategy, consisting of expert control for decomposition ratio gradient and feed-forward compensation of predictive model for the last-tank decomposition ratio, was proposed. Then, the expert controller for the decomposition ratio gradient was designed in detail, whose rule-bases were created by the analysis and conclusion of the experience.According to the CCD process, the requirement analysis of application software was illustrated in detail, and a software architecture was established by the architecture model, which was composed of some software components, such as data sampling, process monitoring, adjusting and controlling, data managing, report generation, curve display, users validation, system parameter setting and system databases. Furthermore, after analyzing the functional components and making full use of the existing components, Microsoft COM component technology was applied to abstraction and capsulation when developing COM components of the system software. The application software of the control system of CCD was assembled by the developed components in accordance with the software architecture.At last, a three-level structure of the expert control system, which included process control, process monitor and workshop management, was established aiming at the CCD process of Zhongzhou company. Then the software function blocks were mainly introduced. The control system has been put into industrial application and has achieved good effect.