Kalman Filter Preview Control for Energy Savings of Large Scale Cascaded Belt Conveying Systems

In various industry productions belt conveyors are widely used for continuous dry bulk material transport. A large scale belt conveying system is generally composed of cascaded single conveyors consuming considerable electric power. According to DIN22101 regulating the belt speed and thereby maximizing the load on the belt may lead to a certain reduction of the needed electrical drive power. To avoid the operational risks, which may be caused by the dynamics of the system, preview control strategy has been proposed for belt conveyor speed control. In case the loading scenarios of a primary conveyor can be measured, the material feeding rate to following conveyors can be previewed. To reduce the influence of noises during material flow measurement and control synchronization, this paper presents the research of adopting Kalman filter to preview control to improve the transient operations of controlled belt conveyors as well as the energy efficiency of the system. Compared to two speed control strategies, the non-constraint preview control and the fuzzy speed control, experimental results show that the proposed Kalman filter based preview control reduces the noise interferences towards softer and safer speed regulation process.