A digital quality control system for an industrial dry process rotary cement kiln

A multivariate autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model for an industrial dry process rotary cement kiln is identified, from real process data, using the maximum likelihood method. The model obtained is then used in computing a controller for quality control of clinker production. It is shown that it is relevant to compute a minimum variance controller subject to restrictions both in the controller structure and the variances of the control signals. The resulting controller is finally implemented on the cement kiln process, together with a target adaptive controller for automatic adjustment of the clinker quality setpoint, in order to save energy.