Process Control of Ball Mill Based on MPC-DO

The grinding process of the ball mill is an essential operation in metallurgical concentration plants. Generally, the model of the process is established as a multivariable system characterized with strong coupling and time delay. In previous research, a two-input-two-output model was applied to describe the system, in which some key indicators of the process were ignored. To this end, a three-input-three-output system is proposed to improve the model accuracy. Moreover, some practical and effective control strategies have been studied. The common control methods, including model predictive control (MPC), disturbance observer (DO), and so on, show poor performance when strong external and internal disturbances exist. In this paper, a composite control strategy based on MPC-DO is put forward to realize the control of the three-input-three-output ball mill system. The disturbances of the system consist of external disturbances including fluctuation of ore hardness and internal disturbances including model mismatches and strong couplings. The proposed MPC-DO controller includes a feedback control component based on MPC and a feed-forward compensation component based on DO. The simulation results indicate that the composite control scheme based on MPC-DO has good performance of tracking and anti-interference in process control of the ball mill.