Neural Network Soft Sensor Application in Cement Industry: Prediction of Clinker Quality Parameters

A soft sensor tries to estimate difficult to measure quality parameters from the knowledge of easy to measure online process variables. Empirical approach of soft sensor development has gained much popularity recently due to availability of huge quantity of actual process data stored in the industrial database. In this work a soft sensor based on back propagation neural network has been developed for rotary cement kiln. For this purpose, data for all variables associated with rotary cement kiln were collected over a period of one month from a cement industry having a capacity of 10000 tons of clinker production per day. Data preprocessing of the raw data has been performed to remove the anomalies present in the original data. The processed data was used to develop the neural network model of the kiln. Model simulation produced quite satisfactory prediction of free lime, C₃S, C₂S and C₃A.