Prediction of raw meal fineness in the grinding process of cement raw material: A two-dimensional convolutional neural network prediction method

Abstract

Raw meal fineness is the percentage content of 80 µm sieving residue after the cement raw material is ground. The accurate prediction of raw meal fineness in the vertical mill system is very helpful for the operator to control the vertical mill. However, due to the complexity of the industrial environment, the process variables have coupling, time-varying delay and nonlinear characteristics in the grinding process of cement raw material. At present, few people pay attention to the coupling characteristics among variables, thus solving this problem is particularly important in raw meal fineness prediction. In this article, we propose a two-dimensional convolutional neural network method that is used to predict raw meal fineness during the grinding process of raw material. Convolutional neural network has strong feature extraction capabilities and does not require manual feature selection. The two-dimensional convolution kernels are used to extract the coupling, time-varying delay and nonlinear features among variables, especially the coupling features. In addition, two important parameters P and L of two-dimensional convolutional neural network model are optimized, respectively. The optimized model solves the problems of coupling, time-varying delay and nonlinearity among variables. Our two-dimensional convolutional neural network model is proved to be very effective by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.