Numerical Investigation of New Cooling Method for Clinker Flow in Opposite Direction with Airflow at Different Height Ratios

Several parameters affect the properties of Portland cement and one of these parameters is the cooling rate of the clinker. If the effectiveness of the cooling method of the clinker increases, a good enhancement in the properties of Portland cement will be found. Depending on the new cooling method suggestion by Nasr et. al. [20], the counter pattern of air clinker flow was studied using (FLUENT 6.3.26). The dimensions of the cooling room in grate cooler, the constant mass flow rate of both clinker and air, different height ratios, and different clinker porosity were considered in this numerical work. The results show that the heat transfers in the first half of the cooling room (0 < X < 0.9 m) is larger than that in the second half (0.9 < X < 1.8 m), and this leads to an increase in the temperature of outlet air so can benefits from it in the heating of furnace. When the clinker and air are flowing in the counter direction, the cooling method is more beneficial when compared with that of parallel flow because the exiting clinker has a great rate of cooler and the air exits from the grate cooler is loaded with large thermal energy. Finally, it can design the best length of gate according to the required clinker temperature at the outlet side, and this results to reduce the cost of the cooling process according to the temperature distribution results at (0 < X > 1.8m) for different porosity and H.R values.

Multi-objective optimization design of cement grate cooler control system based on improved long short-term memory network

For the cement production process, the optimization method of the grate cooler is important in reducing energy consumption and ensuring product quality. As a complicated and slow control process, there are several control objectives of the grate cooler, which are determined by design parameters. To compute the time delay of the design parameters automatically, we propose an improved long short-term memory with adaptive computation time (ACT-LSTM) model for objective prediction. An improved multi-objective optimization algorithm named bounded stable non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (BS-NSGA-II) is proposed to solve the optimal solutions. With the proposed methods, the average electricity consumption is reduced by 13.2%, the secondary air temperature is increased, the clinker outlet temperature is stabilized in a reasonable range, and the design parameters change smoothly. The experiment results have indicated that the proposed method is effective in the optimization of objectives and the stability operation of the equipment.