Energy-saving Control System Of Belt Conveyor Based On Variable Time Interval Method

Belt conveyors,as important tools of bulk material handling,are widely used in various industries like metallurgy,coal mine,building materials,transportation and power sector.With the development of science and technology and the expansion of production scale,belt conveyor is fast developed on transportation distance,transportation speed and traffic flow,which leads to that its power consumption and electricity costs in the transportation process are increasing.Therefore,improving the operation efficiency of belt conveyor and reducing the energy consumption are indispensable to achieve energy conservation and reduction of enterprise costs.The belt conveyor usually runs at a constant nominal speed,but the load on belt is usually in a state of half load or no load caused by that the feeding rate is irregular in the process of production.The method controlling the belt speed for matching with the feeding rate,which is named speed control,can improve the utilization ratio of belt and save energy consumption and electricity cost.However,because of the complexity of the belt conveyor transport system,speed control is still theoretical and cannot have adapted to the working condition.Therefore,with the consideration of the general working condition,variable time interval method is proposed based on the basic theory of the speed control,and a belt conveyor energy-saving control system is constructed with a dSPACE real-time simulation platform and an experimental belt conveyor for verifying the feasibility and advancement of variable time interval method.Firstly,the existing control method and energy-saving method were introduced,and the general conditions of conveyor system,the dynamic characteristic and the energy consumption model of belt conveyor was analyzed.The feasibility and advantages of applying the variable time interval method in speed control were studied.Then the objective function of energy consumption was constructed,the mean of determining reference speed was studied,acceleration and deceleration operation was analyzed,and the variable interval speed control method is proposed and simulated.The main parts of belt conveyor and dSPACE real-time simulation platform were introduced and an energy-saving control system of belt conveyor is built,in which transportation load was simulated by load device and real-time energy consumption was measured by a power meter.Finally,experiments were conducted,which tested running status of the system and energy saving of the variable time interval method.Experimental results show that the energy-saving control system can completely operate,and the variable time interval method can effectively save the energy consumption of the belt conveyor.The belt conveyor energy-saving control system can bring a new operating model for coal mine,can improve operation efficiency of belt conveyor,can reduce energy consumption and electricity cost,and can increase the coal mine production capacity and production efficiency with the use of existing equipment.