Design And Development Of The Simulation System For Shaft Furnace Process Control Based On METSIM Software

The shaft furnace roasting process is a critical procedure of hematite process. Its qualities affect the technic index of the subsequent grinding and magnetic separation process, such as metal recoveries and concentrate grade. So we must control the production index:magnetic tube recovery ratio. However, the shaft process has so many uncertainty factors, such as multivariable strong coupling, large time-delay and the key engineering parameters which cannot be detected online or on time that parameters are hard to be controlled. It is difficult to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the influences for the running qualities. Therefore, the automatic control of MTRR is usually achieved by the operational optimal control technique. The commissioning of operational optimal control system largely relies on experiments conducted on real industrial process, which are of high cost and risk. In order to decrease the costs and risks of practical debugging, how to establish the control simulation system of shaft furnace process for engineering in laboratory is an issue.There are used for the steady-state process and short of element for shaft process in existing software. Forever, the simulation software cannot connect the control system. The model of scholarship for the specific process object is lack of the support of thermodynamic database, which cannot solve the problem caused by the changes of mineral composition thermodynamic parameter. To solve these problems, this paper which is supported by National 973 Program "Basic Research of Complex Manufacturing Process for Integrated Control Theory and Technology" of State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries in Northeastern University introduces a technique of using the metallurgical process simulation software METSIM to form a semi-physical simulation system for shaft furnace roasting process. The system makes use of the thermodynamic database, physics database and elementary unit to develop the dynamic model of shaft process. The system realizes communication between the simulation object and PLC control system by using the own data communication interface software, which can be used as a simulation experiment platform for the design of operational optimal control system.The details are as follows:(1)The dynamic model of shaft furnace roasting process based on METSIM software is designed and developed. Taking advantage of the abundant physics database of the METSIM software, we built the simulation model based on METSIM software. Meanwhile, to realize the dynamic simulation of shaft furnace process, the DDE dynamic data link interface is configured on the basis of the control layer.(2)The remote access of data communication interface software of shaft process based on EXCEL VBA is designed and developed. We can realize the connection between the simulation object of the shaft process and control system on the basis of the DDE-OPC data communication mechanism.(3)The control system of basic loop based on Rockwell software is designed and developed. Aiming at the temperature of burning room, the flow of heating gas and the flow of reduction gas of the shaft process, we develop the basic control loop of PID.(4)The human-computer interface of the shaft process based on RSView32 is designed and developed. The process control variables and PID parameters can be adjusted online by means of the model and trend configuration. Meanwhile the important process index data is displayed in real time.(5)The union simulation experiments are performed on the platform of above-mentioned developed control system and the optimization system of the shaft process. The practicability and effectiveness are verified.