Proceeding of the 11th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation

Shenyang, China, June 29 - July 4 2014

Intelligent Dynamic Modeling for Online Estimation of

Burning Zone Temperature in Cement Rotary Kiln*
Ping Zhou and Meng Yuan
State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries
Northeastern University
Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China
zhouping@mail.neu.edu.cn
Abstract - Cement rotary kiln is a complex multivariable,
large-disturbances and nonlinear system which is full of mass
transfer, heat transfer, and physical and chemical reactions. The
burning zone temperature (BZT) in cement rotary kiln is a very
important production index and has a significant role on the
quality of the clinker. However, the BZT is generally difficult to
be measured online using the conventional instruments. Although
the BZT can be detected by using the expensive infrared
pyrometer which located at the kiln head hood, it generally loses
veracity due to the complex dynamics of the cement rotary kiln.
Obviously, such an inaccurate measurement may guide the
operator to do some improper operations in practice. To attack
such a practical engineering problem, an intelligence-based
dynamic soft-sensor modeling approach is proposed to online
estimate the BZT in cement rotary kiln in this paper. The
proposed approach mainly includes two digital filters which are
used to pre-process the original measurement data, and an
intelligent CBR soft-sensor system which is adapted to online
predict the BZT in time, according to the measured secondary
variables. At last, industrial tests have been performed to
demonstrate the good estimation performance of the proposed
method for a real cement rotary kiln process.

China. As a result, the product quality is hared to be kept

consistent and energy consumption remains high. Although
several advanced control strategies including fuzzy control,
artificial neural network based control and predictive control
have been introduced into process control of rotary kiln, all
these researches focused on trying to achieve complete
automatic control without human operators [1, 3-6]. As a
matter of fact, the boundary conditions of a cement rotary kiln
change heavily. For example, the material load, water content
and components of the raw material slurry vary frequently and
severely. Moreover, the offline analysis data of components of
raw material slurry reach the operator with large time delay.
Thus complete automatic control without human operation for
such a complex process is unpractical.
For the cement rotary kiln process, the most difficult
control problem is that the key technical index, burning zone
temperature (BZT), is difficult to be measured online using
the conventional instruments. Even if some factory use
expensive infrared pyrometer located at kiln head hood to
measure the burning zone temperature directly. However, due
to the complex dynamics of the cement rotary kiln, such a
measurement generally loses veracity, which will misadvise
the operator to do some improper operations to the running
process. To attack such a practical problem, this paper
develops an intelligent soft-sensor modeling approach for
burning zone temperature using case-based reasoning (CBR)
[7-10] estimation technique. Industrial test and results have
show the effectiveness and validity of the proposed method.

Index Terms - Burning zone temperature, Cement rotary kiln,

Dynamic soft-sensor, Case-based reasoning, Digital filter.

I. INTRODUCTION
Rotary kiln is a kind of large scale sintering device widely
used in various process industries, such as metallurgical,
cement, refractory materials, chemical and environment
protection [1-3]. In the cement production industry, the
cement rotary kiln decomposition is the most important unit,
and its operating status serious affects the output, quality,
energy consumption, and environment pollution. The
automation problem of such complicated processes remains
unsolved because of the following inherent complexities. It is
a multivariable nonlinear system with strong coupling. The
complicated working mechanism includes physical change
and chemical reaction of material, procedure of combustion,
thermal transmission among gaseous fluid, solid material fluid
and the liner. Moreover, the key controlled variable of burning
zone temperature is difficult to be measured. In fact, most of
rotary kilns are still under manual control with human
operator observing the burning status; this is especially true in

II. PROCESS DESCRIPTION OF CEMENT ROTARY KILN

Rotary kiln is one of the key equipments in a cement
industry used to convert calcareous raw meal to cement
clinkers. The kiln, as shown in Fig. 1, is a long and complex
tunnel, with a cylindrical shape. The cement rotary kiln
process under study can be described as follows:
Raw material slurry is sprayed into the rotary kiln from
upper end (the kiln head), the coal powders from the coal
injector and the primary air from the air blower are mixed into
bi-phase fuel flow, which is sprayed into the kiln head hood
and combusts with the secondary air, which comes from the
cooler. The heated gas was brought to the kiln tail by the
induced draft fan, while the material moves to the kiln head

This work is partially supported by NSF Grant #61104084, #61290323, #61333007, IAPI Fundamental Research Funds Grant #2013ZCX02-09, and the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities Grant #N130508002 to P. Zhou and M. Yuan.

978-1-4799-5825-2/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

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Raw
material

Coal
Powder
Headend
of kiln

Air

Reaction
exothermic
zone

Bunring
zone

Cooling
zone

Decomposite
zone

Preheating
zone

Drying
zone

Back
-end
of the
kiln

Cement Rotary Kiln

Clinker

Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of cement rotary kiln

Input
Variable

versa is to happen for lower the temperature to be. At the

burning zone, the high temperature melts the classificated
meal. Then the main chemical reactions between silicates and
oxygen of the air occur. A part of the combustion gases is the
Co gas produced here. Finally, the cement crystals are made
and go out from the kiln as the clinker [1-3]..
The burning zone temperature (BZT Bzt ) in cement
rotary kiln is a very important production index and has a
significant role on the quality of the clinker. According to the
physical phenomena taking place in the rotary kiln, the main
process variables (measurable and adjustable) that affect the
BZT are coal (fuel) feed rate CF (t/h), exhaust air feed rate
AF (m/s), raw marital feed rate RF (t/h), and kiln rotation
speed K S (r/m).
Increasing CF will enhance the reaction in the rotary
kiln, causing the lame to burn well and the BZT to rise.
Increasing RF will increase the reactant in the rotary kiln
and cause its temperature to rise; however, when RF
increases to a certain extent, it will cause the BZT to
decrease.
Increasing AF will speed up the reaction in the kiln and
increase the exhaust emission, causing the kiln
temperature to rise. However, when AF increases to a
certain extent, there will be insufficient air for
combustion, and incomplete combustion will generate
CO, causing the sintering temperature to decrease.

K S can be adjusted by the volume of the input materials

to rotary kiln, feed rate of raw mix. In the case of more
input materials, K S should be adjusted to complete the
burning process. On the other hand, K S can itself
interfere in the kiln temperature.

Burning zone temperature

(Sampled value)
Cement Rotary Kiln Process

CBR
Soft-sensor
Estimated value
Model

Data Preprocessing

Learning Algorithm

Fig.2 The proposed intelligent soft-sensor modeling strategy for burning zone
temperature

x1 (t )
x2 (t )
x3 (t )
x4 (t )

CBR System for

Soft-Sensor of
BurningZone
x (t 1) Temperature
1 2

z 1
z

z 1
z 1
z 1

x1 (t 1)

y (t )

x3 (t 1)
x4 (t 1)
y (t 1)

Fig.3 Dynamic ANN soft-sensor model

via the rotation of the kiln and its self weight, in counter
direction with the gas. Raw material is carried along the kiln a
very low speed. Near the middle of the kin is the firing zone,
where gas burners are placed to impose a given temperature
profile. In a kiln, the back-end is responsible for the
calcification of meal before the main baking, so if the
temperature of back-end is more than the acceptable range, the
baking will be done before entering the burning zone, and vice

III. DYNAMIC SOFT-SENSOR MODELING FOR BZT

The key problem of closed-loop control of the BZT is that
it is cannot be measured online with conventional methods.
The most effective method of overcoming it is that employ

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X (t ) [ x 1 (t ), x 2 (t ), x 3 (t ), x 4 (t ), x 1 (t 1),

soft-sensor technique to online estimate the BZT. Due to casebased reasoning (CBR) has good ability to identify and
control complex nonlinear systems [6-10], the CBR-based
soft-sensor dynamic modeling approach is therefore employed
to develop a BZT soft-sensor in this paper.
The CBR utilizes the specific case information available
as historical precedence for proposing solutions to current
problem. The most important aspects of the existing cases are
first stored and indexed. New problem situations are then
presented and similar, existing cases are identified from the
knowledge base. Finally, the previous problem solutions are
adapted and the revised solutions are proposed for the current
situation [7-10].
The proposed CBR based soft-sensor modeling approach
for dynamical estimating the BZT is shown in Fig.2. It mainly
consists of a process data pre-processing module and a
dynamic CBR soft-sensor system.

x 2 (t 1), x 3 (t 1), x 4 (t 1), y (t 1)]

It is noted that to capture the system dynamics, the time
series and time delays of the input and output variables have
been taken into account in the proposed dynamic CBR model.
The reasoning flow of CBR-based soft-sensor mainly
includes case representation, case retrieval and case matching,
case reuse, and case revision.
a) Case representation. As shown in Table I, the case
representation consists two parts, case descriptors and
solutions of cases. The case descriptors include the coal (fuel)
feed rate CF (t ) , the exhaust air feed rate AF (t ) , the raw
marital feed rate RF (t ) , the kiln rotation speed K S (t ) , .the
past value of CF (t 1), AF (t 1), RF (t 1) , K S (t 1) , and
Bzt (t 1) , which defined as f1 , f 2 , , f9 , respectively. The
case solution is Bzt (t ) which is needed to be estimated.

A. Data Pre-Processing
If the original secondary variables O {CF , AF ,
RF , K S } are used for soft-sensor modelling and calculating
directly, it will cause some adverse influences on estimation
precision. Therefore, digital filtering technique is employed to
pre-process these original data.

b) Case retrieval and case matching. Let the description

characteristics of the current cement rotary kiln process is
F T ( f1T , f 2T , , f9T ) . Define the case similarity between the
current rotary kiln system and the k th (1 k N ) case of the
case base Ck :{Fk J k } as SIM k , which is given by

a) Noise peak filtering algorithm [11]: It is used to

eliminate the noise peak jump.
If

SIM
(
F
,
F
)
i simi ( f iT , fi , k )

k
k

1
i

T
sim ( f T , f ) 1 f i f i , k
i i i,k
max( fi T , fi , k )

O (t ) E (t 1)

Then E (t ) O (t ),
If E (t 1) O (t )
Then E (t ) E (t 1)

i 1

(1)

where coefficients j denote case feature weights that

If O (t ) E (t 1)

generally attained by expert experience. The cases that satisfy

the following condition

Then E (t ) E (t 1)
where t denotes sampling time, E (t ) denotes the preproceed data by the noise peak filter, is the maximal
allowed variety value of O (t ) at successive sampling time.

SIM k ( F T , Fk ) yz
0.95, max (SIM k ( F T , Fk )) 0.95
k 1,, m

(SIM k ( F T , Fk )), max (SIM k ( F T , Fk )) 0.95

kmax
k 1,, m
1,, m

b) Average moving filtering algorithm: It is used to

eliminate the lower and high frequency noise fluctuation.

(2)

will be retrieved as the matching cases with ranking in

descending order of SIM k .

(t ) E (t N )
F (t ) F (t 1) E
N

c) Case reuse. Suppose that the matching cases are

CrM :{FrM J rM }, r 1, , R , where R is the number of

where N is the length of average moving filtering.

matching cases. The case solution S T of F T ( f1T , f 2T ,

B. CBR-Based Dynamic Soft-sensor Algorithm

Fig.3 illustrates the CBR-based BZT soft-sensor model,
where x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , x 4 present the secondary variables of
CF , AF , RF , K S , y stands for the main variables, i.e. the
burning zone temperature ( Bzt ). This means that the CBR
soft-sensor model consists of 9 inputs and 1 outputs, therefore
the dynamic input-output relation of the soft-sensor can be
represented as follows.

, f9T ) can be obtained by

3
T
M
(SIM r ( F , Fr ) sr )
r 1

, if r 3
3
ST
T
SIM r ( F , Fr )

r 1
M
s1 , if r 3

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(3)

TABLE I
CASE REPRESENTATION

f1

f2

f3

f4

CF (t )

AF (t )

RF (t )

K S (t )

Case descriptor (F)

f5
f6

CF (t 1)

AF (t 1)

f7

f8

f9

Case solution (S)

s1

RF (t 1)

K S (t 1)

Bzt (t 1)

Bzt (t )

TABLE II
INITIAL CASE BASE OF CBR SOFT-SENSOR SYSTEM
CF (t )

AF (t )

RF (t )

K S (t )

167.42
166.64
168.76
167.83

28.82
28.23
27.42
27.62

9.02
9.07
8.46
8.71

3.633
3.834
3.656
3.728

Case descriptors (F)

CF (t 1)
AF (t 1)
166.22
167.34
166.46
168.23

27.852
28.21
27.82
28.22

1515

K S (t 1)

Bzt (t 1)

Case solution (S)

Bzt (t )

8.92
8.87
8.25
8.93

3.734
3.721
3.726
3.672

1451.7
1463.2
1510.2
1502.7

1471.1
1473.3
1500.1
1501.3

1510

1510

1505

1505

Sampled value

Burning zone temperature,

RF (t 1)

1500
1495
1490

1500

1495

1490

1485

Estimated value
Sampled value

1480
1475

10

20

30

1485

40

50

60

1480
1480

70

Sampled data

1485

1490

1495

1500

1505

1510

Estimated value

Fig.4 Testing results of burning zone temperature estimation with the

proposed method

Fig.6 Scatter diagram of the burning zone temperature estimations with

proposed method

10
9

IV. INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS

In this section, we will use the above proposed CBR

based dynamic soft-sensor method to model a cement
production line. In the past, the BZT could not be obtained
online and closed-loop control for it could not be realized in
this cement production line. Using the proposed data filter
method on the sampled data, collect 110 groups of sampled
data from the industrial process was collected to develop the
initial case base for the CBR soft-sensor system. A partial
sequence of the case data of the initial case base is shown in
Table II.
The prediction effect of the developed dynamic CBRbased soft-sensor under a wide range of operation conditions
is shown in Fig. 4 and Fig.5. It can be seen that the developed
CBR soft-sensor system obtains satisfactory performances. No
matter what operation conditions are changed in the cement
rotary kiln process, the output of the developed soft-sensor
can estimate the actual burning zone temperature very well.
According to statistical analysis, the average absolute
estimation errors are small than 3.2.
The performance of estimation can also be visualized by
plotting the measured results against the predicted ones, which

Estimated error

7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Sampled data

Fig.5 Estimating error of with the proposed method

d) Case revision. The case revision is a very important

issue in the CBR-based decision system. After the grinding
system obtains the solution S T as the estimation of BZT for
the CBR soft-sensor system, if the actual BZT is better, it
confirms that the formerly estimation is reasonable. Therefore,
there is no need to carry out case revision. Otherwise, it needs
to revise the case and store this revised new case. The detailed
revision procedures can be consulted in Ref. [3].

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Simulation, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 583-587, 2011.
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as shown in Fig.6. The abscissa of this figure is the value of

actual measurement, and corresponding coordinate is the
value of estimation with the proposed algorithm. The closer
distribution of splashes gets to the black diagonal line, the
better estimation effects are realized. When the estimated
values match the measured ones, all points would lie on a
diagonal. It can be seen from Fig.6 that the proposed modeling
method gives the best estimation of the burning zone
temperature. Although some points are relatively far from the
diagonal line, the prediction of the proposed model is closer to
the actual value very well. Such results show that this
predictor can satisfy the requirement of BZT control.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The burning zone temperature in the cement rotary kiln
process is a very important technical index, on which the
sinter quality mainly relies. However, due to the complex
dynamic charactertics in terms of nonlinearity, large time
delay and time-varying, it is difficult to online measure the
burning zone temperature using conventional instruments. In
this paper, an intelligence-based dynamic soft-sensor
modeling approach for burning zone temperature using CBR
estimation technique is proposed in this paper. Industrial test
results show that the developed soft-sensor can online
estimate the burning zone temperature very well.
REFERENCES
[1] X. J. Zhou, H. Yue, et al, Supervisory control for rotary kiln temperature
based on reinforcement learning, Lecture Notes in Control and
Information Sciences, vol. 344, pp. 428-437, 2006.
[2] N. Fallahpour, A. Fatehi, et al, A supervisory fuzzy control of back-end
temperature of rotary cement kilns, Proceeding of International

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