Determination of the repose angle of stuff in rotary kiln based on imaging processing

The repose angle of materials in rotary kiln is an important parameter to describe stuff's motion which reflects the quality of stuff sinter indirectly. In this paper, a novel method, using digital image processing and linear fitting, is devoted to measure the repose angle. The whole process includes: images segmentation using FCM, Morphology operation to extract the stuff region, edge scanning and calculation of the repose angle with linear least square regression. The experiment carried out based on image captured from an alumina rotary kiln video. The result demonstrates its effectiveness to recognize the value and the variation trend of repose angle. It provides reliable and direct data to real-time detect stuff motion and can be utilized to judge the stuff quality, which is significant for operating optimization and automatic control of rotary kiln.