Neuro-controller of cement rotary kiln temperature with adaptive critic designs

The production process of the cement rotary kiln is a typical engineering thermodynamics with large inertia, lagging and nonlinearity. So it is very difficult to control this process accurately using traditional control theory. In order to guarantee the process to be stable, and to produce the high-grade cement clinker, it is important to make the temperature of the sintering zone stable. Artificial neural networks offer a solution to this problem due to their advantages, such as self-organization, self-adaptivity and fault tolerance. This paper introduces a novel nonlinear optimal neuro-controller which is based on adaptive critic design and uses the structure of action-dependant heuristic dynamic programming (ADHDP). The principle of ADHDP is presented. An action network and a critic network are set up in such a way that they basically learn from interactions based on local measurement to optimize the neuro-controller. The ADHDP neuro-controller has a simple frame-work and is independent from the system model. A simulation of the cement rotary kiln is carried out using Matlab/Simulink. The simulation results show that using the ADHDP neuro-controller it is possible to keep the temperature of sintering zone stable in a certain range, and the temperature can meet the requirements of cement clinker production. Simulation results also are presented to show that the neuro-controller with the ACD has the potential to control the cement rotary kiln.