OPTIMAL CONTROL: HIGHLY PRECISE MEASUREMENT OF BALL MILL PARAMETERS Peter Kalkert KIMA Echtzeitsysteme GmbH, Germany

Ball mills are still the most widespread machines for comminution in the cement industry. Being robust and simple in construction and operation, their greatest disadvantage is bad energy efficiency. In principle the absolute majority of energy drawn by the motor is used to lift the ball charge and the material being ground and only a small fraction of this energy is used to reduce the size of the material. Typical values for cement mills are in the order of 3 6 %! All the other energy is lost for the process of grinding (Fig. 1). As ball mills in cement plants are by far the biggest consumers of electrical energy, there is an ongoing demand to operate them at optimum energy efficiency, that means: lowering the specific energy consumption (SEC, kWh/ton), thereby increasing the throughput also.
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The appearance of modern separators already had a 20 significant impact on the overall efficiency of 10 0 grinding circuits. Having achieved this, running the 1 2 mill at its optimum operation point in terms of optimum fill level of material and keeping it there is Figure 1 the next challenge. The reason for this being: an empty mill draws energy without grinding, while an overfilled mill absorbs the energy of the falling / tumbling balls, without significant size reduction. The optimum must be somewhere in between these operation points. Meanwhile a deeper understanding of the processes inside of ball mills, separators and complete grinding circuits, as well as the appearance of modern control systems, which are specifically targeted towards complicated nonlinear processes with time delays, open up new perspectives. Figure 2 shows a model of a grinding circuit containing a ball mill and all relevant time constants, that have to be taken into account for a high performance closed loop control system. Figure 2

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The most important parameter, the residence time of material inside of the ball mill, is a nonlinear function of various mill parameters (length, diameter, ball charge, diaphragm ), but mainly depends on the actual throughput or actual level of material being ground (see Fig. 3). Consequently, optimal control of the grinding process first needs precise measurement of the underlying parameters. Level of the material and its temperature in

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the mill, which are the dominant Figure 3 Residence time of material inside of the mill parameters in a cement ball mill, need to be known to a high precision. Using structure borne sound sensors fitted directly on the mills shell enables the measurement of level of feed material in first AND second chamber individually, to a precision of ~ 1 % (see figure 4). A thermocouple, inserted directly in the diaphragm between first and second chamber delivers the temperature of the clinker inside of the mill to a precision of 1 C. For the closed loop control of grinding circuits, classical strategies like feed + rejects! = constant only show moderate results. Especially for start up, change of recipe or shut down conditions, these control strategies show bad performance, which can be understood in terms of varying time constants of the system to be controlled. Using modern fuzzy based expert systems, which can react on multiple inputs and adapt to changing conditions, high performance controllers can be built, which are stable even under heavily varying Figure 4 conditions and show very tight and precise control. Combining these high precision measurements with advanced control strategies, enables the operation of grinding plants at higher throughput and more constant quality.

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