A Hybrid Control Strategy for Real-Time Control of the Iron Removal Process of the Zinc Hydrometallurgy Plants

As part of the zinc hydrometallurgy plant, the iron removal process is a complex system with four cascaded reactors. Tighter process-index control is difficult to achieve due to the complicated, long, and time-varying removal process. The control performance is also affected by the quality of the ore source and external disturbances. Little research is documented in the literature to address these difficulties and manual control is widely used. An innovative hybrid control strategy is developed to control the iron removal process' indices within narrow ranges with minimum cost of additive regents, including oxygen and zinc oxide. This strategy is composed of an optimal setting model, a model-based optimal controller, an integrated prediction model, a fuzzy-logic-based feedforward compensator, and a model feedback adjustor. The optimal setting model automatically optimizes the set-points of the process indices under different production conditions. To achieve the process requirements with minimal cost, the model-based optimal controller is designed. The integrated prediction model is established to provide a more accurate on-line prediction of the process indices by integrating the mechanism prediction model and an error compensation model based on the least-square support vector machine. Based on the predicted process indices, the compensator is developed for the optimal controller. The adjustor provides a parameter adjustment mechanism. Four-week-long industrial experiments in the largest zinc hydrometallurgy plant in China show that the control strategy can not only improve the process-indexes control performance, but also save 6.55% oxygen and 4.61% zinc oxide consumptions, which translates to 222 858 m(3) oxygen and 1236 t zinc oxide per year (a saving of about $570 000). The hybrid control strategy can be extended to cover other similar processes in the zinc hydrometallurgy and other industries.