Comparison of two Control Strategies for a Roast Process

摘要

A well known routine for the production of vanadium is alkaline roasting of steel slag in a multiple hearth furnace or rotary kiln. Previous work concerning this process contains the design of a dynamic model capable of calculating the mass flow, temperatures and concentrations of decisive components in a multiple hearth furnace, an empirically obtained model of the chemical reaction kinetics and a control system mainly based on expert knowledge of an industry scale plant. The current work compares the performance of a model-based control system to the previously published knowlcdgc-bascd control system. The knowledge-based control system represents a robust system due to the implementation of expert knowledge gained in many years of manual control. Nevertheless, the comparison showed advantages of the model-based control system and indicated major control limitations.