Advanced Control of an Industrial Closed-Loop Grinding Circuit

Abstract This paper gives an industrial application of advanced control strategies using basic functions available in distributed control systems (DCS). The process under study is an industrial full-scale closed-loop grinding circuit where pulp solid mass fraction is to be controlled at the mill and at the cyclones. An algebraic implementation of a Kalman filter is used to evaluate the unmeasured pulp solid mass fraction at the mill discharge using mass balance relations. A static decoupler is used to eliminate the interaction between the two controlled variables. Open-loop adaptation is used to take into account the non-linearity of the process in conjunction with an internal model controller.