Identification of the Dynamic Properties of the Coal Flotation Process as a Control Object with the Use of the Kalman Filter

Jarosław Joostberens, Aurelia Rybak () and Aleksandra Rybak
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Jarosław Joostberens: Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation in Industry, Faculty of Mining, Safety Engineering and Industrial Automation, Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland
Aurelia Rybak: Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation in Industry, Faculty of Mining, Safety Engineering and Industrial Automation, Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland
Aleksandra Rybak: Department of Physical Chemistry and Technology of Polymers, Faculty of Chemistry, Silesian University of Technology, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 21, 1-13

Abstract: For various sorts of hard coal, enrichment by flotation is used for feed consisting of grains smaller than 0.5 mm. Regarding process automation, coal flotation is a multidimensional, dynamic nonlinear object of control, for which the main control signal is the flow rate of the flotation agent. Typically, in Polish coal-processing facilities the monitoring and control systems of the flotation process can only measure the parameter of the waste quality (content of ash in flotation tailings). This naturally becomes an output signal, enabling an indirect assessment of the ongoing process. Therefore, knowledge of the dynamic properties of the flotation process, analysed as an object with one control input (the flow rate of the flotation agent) and with one output for measuring (content of ash in flotation tailings) may be material in designing automatic control systems for this operation. It is important to use an appropriate identification method when developing a model of the dynamics of the flotation process, especially if the model parameters are to be determined on an ongoing basis. This article discusses the research method and presents the results of applying the method of identifying the dynamic properties of the coal flotation process with the use of the Kalman filter. We carried out a comparative analysis of the results obtained by this method based on the Kalman algorithm and the method of least squares, taken as the reference method. The presented parameters of the dynamic models were calculated based on actual data obtained from industrial tests conducted at the coal-processing plant at one of the Polish mines. It was demonstrated that, for control purposes, the Kalman algorithm can be successfully applied in identification of the coal flotation process. This is due to the fact that it gives satisfactory results in relation to the adopted reference method despite the fact that it is a recursive algorithm.

Keywords: identification; the Kalman filter; coal flotation; method of least squares (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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