Design And Development Of An Electrical Testing Platform Of Equipment Logic Control Program For Mineral Process

Mineral processing industry occupies an important position in national economy. Realizing the automatic control of it is serving as the key to improving product quality, saving energy and reducing consumption and rightsizing. Automatic control system, especially the PLC control software, needs to go through a series of time-consuming, laborious and risky debugging process before being putted into operation in the field. Therefore, in order to shorten the time, save manpower, reduce the risk and decrease the cost of debugging, it is of great significance to test the PLC control software in advance and early find and correct errors in the PLC control software in the laboratory environment.Equipment logic control program in mineral processing automation system is an important part of control program in PLC control software. Its function is controlling the start, stop and interlock protection of the processing equipments. At present, laboratory tests of logic control program in the mineral process are always conducted just under the environment of simulation based on pure software instead of the real electric environment, which may lead to defective complete program.According to the characteristics of the processing equipments’logic control, this paper designs and develops a set of electrical testing platform for equipment logic control program, and it is based on the National Science and Technology Supporting Program "Advanced Control Technology of Whole production Line of Mineral Processing" (2012BAF19G01).The main works are summarized as follows:1. Based on analysis of the equipment control programs, mode and its electrical circuit, the common types of electric circuits of the equipment are summarized and the necessity and the difficulty of researching and developing electrical testing platform are analyzed, considering the characteristics of numerous equipment, large scale in mineral processing and previous project cases.2. This paper has designed the overall architecture of electrical testing platform for PLC equipment control program which consists of electric cabinet and electric circuits of the monitoring system. It can provide the real electric environment with flexible configuration, compact structure and transparent electrical test process. In allusion to the difficulties in research, the optimization design method, based on the integration and combination of the electric circuits, is presented, which greatly reduces the number of the required electric circuits of the test platform, while maintaining the functionality unchanged.3. Using WINCC flexible and SIMATIC Manager of Siemens PLC software development tools, electrical testing platform monitoring system is developed, aiming at making the electrical test process transparent.4. The function of the electrical testing platform proposed is verified in this paper. Taking the PLC equipment control program of a mineral plant’s automation project as an example, this paper verified the availability of the electrical testing platform. The result shows that the PLC control program testing results are more reliable and more visualized and that the testing efficiency can also be improved with the aid of the platform, which can contribute to shorten the time, reduce the risk and decrease the cost of debugging.