SOFT SENSOR FOR ADVANCED PROCESS CONTROL FOR INDURATION FURNACES

Over the last decades soft sensors were established as an important alternative to the traditional acquisition and monitoring of critical variables and other tasks related to process control. This paper discuss the pelletizing process characteristics, emphasizing the induration furnace for burned pellets production, that are critical for the development of sensors based on phenomenological models. This work uses Virtual Indurator(TM), a simulator for the induration furnace, combined to the advanced process controller OptProcess( plus or minus ). The software OptProcess acquires online values of the process, analyses and corrects those data, sends it as input to the simulator and evaluate the results obtained from the simulation. An increase of productivity as the result of the advanced control with the model is expected, as the model has information about the tendency of the process performance by anticipating laboratory results, leading also to a stability of these values.