Neuro-fuzzy modelling of blending process in cement plant

The profitability of a cement plant depends largely on the efficient operation of the blending stage, therefore, there is a need to control the process at the blending stage in order to maintain the chemical composition of the raw mix near or at the desired value with minimum variance despite variation in the raw material composition. In this work, neuro-fuzzy model is developed for a dynamic behaviour of the system to predict the total carbonate content in the raw mix at different clay feed rates. The data used for parameter estimation and model validation was obtained from one of the cement plants in Nigeria. The data was pre-processed to remove outliers and filtered using smoothening technique in order to reveal its dynamic nature. Autoregressive exogenous (ARX) model was developed for comparison purpose. ARX model gave high root mean square error (RMSE) of 5.408 and 4.0199 for training and validation respectively. Poor fit resulting from ARX model is an indication of nonlinear nature of the process. However, both visual and statistical analyses on neuro-fuzzy (ANFIS) model gave a far better result. RMSE of training and validation are 0.28167 and 0.7436 respectively, and the sum of square error (SSE) and R-square are 39.6692 and 0.9969 respectively. All these are an indication of good performance of ANFIS model. This model can be used for control design of the process.