Fuzzy Control of a Sintering Plant Using the Charging Gates

The industrial priorities in the automation of the sinter plant comprise stable production rate at the highest productivity level specially within an integrated steelwork and classical control scheme may fail due to the complexity of the sinter process. The paper describes an approach exploiting a fuzzy rule- based expert system to control the charging gates of a sinter plant. Two different control strategies are presented and discussed in details within an innovative advisory system that supports the plant operators in the choice of the most promising action to do on each gate. A third strategy that combines the strong points of the two detailed ones is presented and studied in feasibility. Through a suitable exploitation of real-time data, the advisory system suggests the most promising action to do by reproducing the knowledge of the most expert operators, supporting the technicians in the control of the plant. Thus, this approach can also be used to train new plant operator before involving them in the actual plant operations. The performance of the detailed strategies and the goodness of the system have been evaluated for long time in the sinter plant of one of the biggest integrated steelworks in Europe, namely the ILVA Taranto Works in Italy.