Coordinating fuzzy control of the sintering

The sintering process is an important step in the iron and steel making process and features strong complexity, nonlinearity and large time-delay. This paper presents a coordinating control method that two fuzzy controllers are designed to control the burning through point (BTP) and the bunker-level. First, the BTP control is the main control task with the sinter strand speed as the control variable, and a predictive fuzzy control scheme is developed where an intermediate process model is used to perform on-line controller design to meet a closed-loop performance specification that is associated with desired process output. Then, a fuzzy controller is designed to control the charging bunker-level via adjusting the strand speed. The two fuzzy controllers are proposed for these two closed-loops and it is shown that the satisfactory response of the closed-loop system can be achieved by handling the strand speed. Results of simulation and actual running illustrate the performance of the proposed method.