Fuming Furnace Smelting End Design And Implementation Of Automatic Identification Systems

The fuming furnace is a water-cooled rectangular furnace. It is widely used to treat zinc mines with low quality and certain metallurgical wastes. such as Lead Blast Furnace slag, Electric Arc Furnace dust, and Neutral Leach Residues from the zinc industry. To recover the zinc from the mine or slag, coal and air are injected to the slag bath. The heat generated causes the zinc to fume as a vapour from the furnace bath and is immediately reoxidized by tertiary air above the bath to form zinc oxide fume.Because the fuming process is very complex and is influenced by lots of uncertain effectors, such as the quality of the coal and the quality of the mines, the producing process of fuming furnace has not be controlled automatically till now.For long time the producing process of fuming furnace is guided by the experience of field workers, that is, the field workers should judge the status of fuming process according to their observations on the flames through the tertiary tuyere and then decide whether to raise the furnace's temperature or begin to recover the zinc or otherwise to stop this round of fuming process. Obviously, the judging accuracy of the fuming status and fuming terminal is an important factor with great effects on the production costs, energy costs and recovery rate.However, the judging accuracy of such manual method is easily and strongly influenced by subjective factors, such as the operators' ability, experience, psychosis and so on, which makes it difficult to guarantee the stability of the products quality and restricts the improvement of producing efficiency.Therefore, to overcome the disadvantages of current judging method, this paper put forward a computer-based method to judging the terminal of fuming furnace, which observes flames by industrial digital camera, discriminates and classifies flames through image processing, pattern recognition and neural network technique. In addition, an automaticterminal judging system for fuming furnace is designed and implemented, and has been tested in Yunnan CHIHONG Zinc & Germanium Co., ltd.The testing result shows that this judging system can effectively discriminate the status of fuming process. The implement of automatic terminal judging system is of great importance to the automatic control of fuming furnace, and is of great advantages to improving the producing efficiency and reducing the labor intensity.