Optimizing the Control System of Cement Milling: Process Modeling and Controller Tuning Based on Loop Shaping Procedures and Process Simulations

Based on a dynamical model of the grinding process in closed circuit mills, efficient efforts have been made to optimize PID controllers of cement milling. The process simulation is combined with an autoregressive model of the errors between the actual process values and the computed ones. Long term industrial data have been used to determine the model parameters. The data include grinding of various cement types. The M Constrained Integral Gain Optimization (MIGO) loop shaping method is utilized to determine PID sets satisfying a certain robustness constraint. The maximum sensitivity is considered as such a criterion. Both dynamical parameters and PID sets constitute the inputs of a detailed simulator which involves all the main process characteristics. The simulation is applied over all the PID sets aiming to find the parameter region that provides the minimum integral of absolute error, which functions as a performance criterion. For each cement type a PID set is selected and put in operation in a closed circuit cement mill. The performance of the regulation is evaluated after a sufficient time period, concluding that the developed design combining criteria of both robustness and performance leads to PID controllers of high efficiency.