Prototyping of an expert system for electrostatic separation processes

The paper aims at presenting several propositions regarding the structure of an expert system capable to capture expertise in the field of electrostatic separation processes and to make it available to all those involved in their industry application. A knowledge base was created and some basic rules were formulated for guiding the choice of the most appropriate electrostatic separation technique for a given application, as well as for tuning the operating parameters in accordance with the characteristics of the granular mixture to be processed. The main difficulty in building this first block of the expert system resided in correlating the extreme diversity of the materials that could be separated and the multitude of electrode configurations described in the literature. The second block of the expert system was meant to transfer expertise in troubleshooting and diagnosis from research or supervisory staff to process operators. By pointing out one of the symptoms listed on the computer screen, the operator can interrogate the knowledge base to identify the problem behind it. An advanced version of this block of the expert system could be employed for the "online monitoring" of the process.