Robust Enhanced Auto-Tuning of PID Controllers for Optimal Quality Control of Cement Raw Mix via Neural Networks

Ensuring efficient long-term quality control of the raw mix remains a priority for the cement industry, supporting initiatives to lower the CO2 footprint by incorporating significant amounts of alternative fuels and raw materials in clinker production. This study presents an effective method for creating a robust auto-tuner for proportional–integral–differential (PID) controller control of the lime saturation factor (LSF) of the raw mix using artificial neural networks (ANNs). This auto-tuner, combined with a previously studied robust PID controller, forms an integrated system that adapts to process changes and maintains low long-term variance in LSF. The ANN links each of the three PID gains to the process dynamic parameters, with the three ANNs also interconnected. We employed the Levenberg–Marquardt method to optimize the ANNs’ synaptic weights and applied the weight decay method to prevent overfitting. The industrial implementation of our control system, using the auto-tuner for 16,800 h of raw mill operation, shows an average LSF standard deviation of 2.5, with fewer than 10% of the datasets exceeding a standard deviation of 3.5. Considering that the measurement reproducibility is 1.44 and assuming a low mixing ratio of the raw meal in the silo equal to 2, the LSF standard deviation in the kiln feed approaches the analysis reproducibility, indicating that disturbances in the raw meal largely diminish in the kiln feed. In conclusion, integrating traditional, well-established tools like PID controllers with newer advanced techniques, such as ANNs, can yield innovative solutions.