A real-time embedded control system for electro-fused magnesia furnace

  • Authors:
  • Fang Zheng;Yang Jie;Tao Shifei;Wu Zhiwei;Chai Tianyou

  • Affiliations:
  • State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China;State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China;State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China;State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China;State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Control Science and Engineering - Special issue on Embedded-Model-Based Control
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Since smelting process of electro-fused magnesia furnace is a complicated process which has characteristics like complex operation conditions, strong nonlinearities, and strong couplings, traditional linear controller cannot control it verywell. Advanced intelligent control strategy is a good solution to this kind of industrial process. However, advanced intelligent control strategy always involves huge programming task and hard debugging and maintaining problems. In this paper, a real-time embedded control system is proposed for the process control of electro-fused magnesia furnace based on intelligent control strategy and model-based design technology. As for hardware, an embedded controller based on an industrial Single Board Computer (SBC) is developed to meet industrial field environment demands. As for software, a Linux based on Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) is used as the realtime kernel of the controller to improve its real-time performance. The embedded software platform is also modified to support generating embedded code automatically from Simulink/Stateflow models. Based on the proposed embedded control system, the intelligent embedded control software of electro-fused magnesium furnace can be directly generated from Simulink/Stateflow models. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed embedded control system, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and industrial field experiments are both implemented. Experiments results show that the embedded control system works very well in both laboratory and industry environments.