A Real-Time Embedded Control System for Electro-Fused Magnesia Furnace

Abstract EN

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 very well.

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 real-time 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.