CRUSHER CONTROL

Compiled By: Khotsofalang Nqhoaki (Process control and Automation Intern)

Date: 11 March 2017 ( all hail the king)

There is a need in the plant (plant1) to control the pan feeder speed in order for fast choke feeding of
the crusher as well as maintaining choke feeding in steady state. In order to do this a robust control
method must be designed to achieve the specifications needed.

There are not much design specifications except the crusher must choke feed within one minute and
maintain that in steady state, currently the P1 secondary crusher choke feeds as shown in the step
response below whose step test was taken by Ntate Khesa on the 3rd March 2017.

P1 Sec crusher

Percentage

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32
Time (min)

Crusher level Bin level Pan feeder speed (%)

modeling the crusher level transfer function with respect to the speed set-point results in

87.1
a first order differential equation whose frequency Domain Transfer function is
(1+2 s) x input
where S=jw and w is the frequency of the crusher. The step response and Bode plot of this transfer
function is shown below:
Since the Step input was 100% set speed, then we can rewrite our complete Transfer function as :
C level (s) 0.871
= where the Time constant is T= 2 minutes, meaning thats when the crusher starts
V panfeeder (s) 1+2 s
to choke feed.

We can now design controllers and run a few simulations and then test for performance.

Our Ideal performance measure will be the rise time (equivalent to choke feeding time) so a basic
controller will suffice.

Note that this controller will require a variable speed drive since we want to control the speed in order
to choke feed and stabilize to run at steady state.

A control method to control systems works in such a way that we look for our desired output normally
referred to as the set-point, we then compare the set point to the actual output we getting. We then
calculate the error from the difference , we adjust our input accordingly to reduce the error in the
second iteration until we reach a level of acceptable error. This all happens when we are trying to let
our system settle hence Fast methods and Computations are needed to achieve the desired goal.
First we will Design a Dynamic Matrix Control (DMC) which will be implemented in the PLC's by
Minopex Control and Instrumentation department. The DMC was first used by Shell Companies in the
early 80's and is available in most Industrial Control systems, Hopefully In the Rockwell systems too.
It is based on the Step Response Model predictive Control Modelling. We have already shown The Step
Response of the crusher and we already showed that the Time to start choke feeding is not satisfactory,
hence our step response will come in handy. It will also be good to also design a tuned Proportional
Integral Derivative (PID) controller although this method is outdated and requires regular tuning of
parameters, it is not very robust when it comes to process changes such as when we change crusher
gaps and other crusher parameters, therefore the implementation is not shown here.

A Dynamic Matrix equation from modern control engineering books is defined as :

The variables will be defined in the references for further understanding of the control law, The Matrix
can be written in compact form as:

we also define the reference Trajectory as r k

And The control law is:

and lambda is the cost factor which we set to 1 in our code.

We run The simulation using the above Equations and code the equations in scilab:

The output of the DMC controller Simulation is shown below:

It can be seen that The crusher choke feeds at exactly the time which we have set, the simulation was
computed with a free open source tool Scilab which is equivalent to its commercial competitor Matlab.
This is just a prove of concept simulation, much work will need to be done if the work is to be
implemented in the plant, for instance we might need to select the right sampling time.

To Understand The Method, please look at the References, and the code attached with this document
will be attached with commented explanations for anyone to test.

References

[1] Carlos, E. et al. 1989. Model Predictive Control: Theory and Practice = A Survey.
Automatica 25. pp 335-348
[2] Scilab Code, Adapted from my undergraduate notes