Prediction of cement specific surface area in the cement mill grinding process: A method combining dual-frequency principal component analysis and extreme gradient boosting

Abstract

The cement specific surface area is an important indicator of cement quality. The accurate prediction of the cement specific surface area aims to guide operators to control the cement grinding process to improve product quality while reducing system energy consumption. However, due to the complexity of the cement grinding process, the process variables have coupling, time-varying delay, nonlinear characteristics, and different sampling frequency. Herein, we proposed the specific surface area prediction model, which combined dual-frequency principal component analysis and extreme gradient boosting (DF-PCA-XGB). In order to solve the problem of difficulty in modeling due to different sampling intervals of related data, this paper analyzes the low-frequency sampling data and high-frequency sampling data under multiple working conditions, and establishes prediction models respectively. Aiming at the data redundancy problem of high-frequency and low-frequency variable data in the introduced time window, a method based on the combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and extreme gradient boosting (XGB) cross-validation is proposed to reduce data redundancy while retaining most of the characteristics of the data. The final specific surface area prediction results were obtained by weighting the high-frequency data model and the low-frequency data model. The simulation results showed that the prediction method in this paper can improve the prediction accuracy of the specific surface area of the finished cement product under multiple working conditions with high stability and has promising application in the cement manufacturing process.