Abstract
Since smelting process of electro-fused magnesia furnace is a complicated process which has characteristics like complex operation conditions, strong nonlinearities, and strong couplings, traditional linear controller cannot control it very well. Advanced intelligent control strategy is a good solution to this kind of industrial process. However, advanced intelligent control strategy always involves huge programming task and hard debugging and maintaining problems. In this paper, a real-time embedded control system is proposed for the process control of electro-fused magnesia furnace based on intelligent control strategy and model-based design technology. As for hardware, an embedded controller based on an industrial Single Board Computer (SBC) is developed to meet industrial field environment demands. As for software, a Linux based on Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) is used as the real-time kernel of the controller to improve its real-time performance. The embedded software platform is also modified to support generating embedded code automatically from Simulink/Stateflow models. Based on the proposed embedded control system, the intelligent embedded control software of electro-fused magnesium furnace can be directly generated from Simulink/Stateflow models. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed embedded control system, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and industrial field experiments are both implemented. Experiments results show that the embedded control system works very well in both laboratory and industry environments.
Highlights
Fused magnesia is an important and widely used refractory and raw material for many industries, which has lots of merits such as high melting point, antioxidation, structural integrity, and strong insulating features [1]
Due to advanced intelligent control methods often involve huge programming task, hard debugging and maintaining problems and are hard to be implemented in programmable logic controller (PLC) and distributed control system (DCS) systems, they are still not widely applied in actual industrial fields
The HIL simulation platform of armtype electro-fused magnesia furnace uses one industrial computer based on BP neural network as a virtual armtype fused magnesia furnace model to simulate the practical operation of arm-type fused magnesia furnace
Summary
Fused magnesia is an important and widely used refractory and raw material for many industries, which has lots of merits such as high melting point, antioxidation, structural integrity, and strong insulating features [1]. According to [8], model-based design technology can effectively enhance the development efficiency and decrease development cycle, as well as reduce later maintenance costs This kind of embedded design method has evoked many researchers’ interests. Model-based design technology was rarely introduced to practical industrial process control fields till especially in the control of smelting process of electro-fused magnesia furnace. The main contribution of this paper is that an intelligent control strategy is adopted to achieve good control performance, an embedded real-time control system is implemented using model-based design technology, and the effectiveness of the proposed system is validated through hardware-in-the-loop experiment and practical industrial experiment.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
