A novel mechanism model of the fluidized bed roaster in the zinc roasting process

The fluidized bed roaster in the zinc roasting process, namely zinc roaster, is one of the most important reactor in the zinc smelter, because its products are the raw material of downstream processes. However, the product quality cannot be measured online in practical zinc smelter. To provide the foundation of the optimizing operation of the zinc roaster, a novel mechanism model of the zinc roaster is built as a soft sensor to predict the product quality in this paper. First, the reaction kinetics of the zinc roaster is analyzed and the kinetics model is built based on the shrinking unreacted core model. In the shrinking unreacted core model, the diffusion reaction in the moving interface is determined as the controlling step, thereby greatly reducing the model complexity. Then, based on the two-phase fluidization theory, a simplified well-mixed model is used to characterize the hydrodynamic properties of the zinc roaster. After that, model parameters are estimated by the particle swarm optimization. Finally, a simulation study based on the industrial data proves the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism model. Copyright (c) 2021The Authors.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).