Modelling and control o f pulverised fuel coal mills 71

A global model for A P can be developed from an energy balance between the air
input and the mill measuring point. Details are given in Fan (1994) with the resulting
equation for A P being

kree-Tds - •2
A P = kpedh + kpadth~a + (1 + Tms) 2dmrc + krldMtr (3.17)

where dh is the distance between the mill entry and the measuring point. The
parameters kpe, kpa, kre and krl are complex functions of mill air flow.
Consequently, the global model is represented by a set of constant-coefficient
lumped-parameter models. These parameters can be determined off-line and stored in
a look-up table relating their values to operating conditions or they can be determined
adaptively on-line. This will be discussed in subsequent sections.

3.2.3.3 Energy model

Large coal mills consume significant amounts of power amounting to about 500 kW
at full load. In addition by observing the mill power requirements for coal pulverising,
useful information about mill wear, coal hardness and other operational issues can be
resolved.
If Eu is the energy required by a unit mass of coal particles to be ground from size
Zl to size z2 and W is the energy required to drive an empty mill, then the energy E
required by a mill charged with coal mass m is

E = m E u + W. (3.18)

Assuming Eu is given by Bond's law (Kunii and Levenspiel, 1969) then

E = mkB(Z21/2 -- z l I/2) (3.19)

where kB is a constant depending on the coal. Since z2 is determined by the mill

classification settings which are fixed, and the raw coal distribution is more or less
constant, the mill power consumption E is mainly a function of the amount of coal
mass m on the mill grinding table. It should be noted that the mass of the mill
M is constant. A similar relationship for the consumed energy is given by Corti
et al. (1986).

3.3 Plant tests, results and fitting model parameters

Models of physical plant are of course only as good as how well they fit
the data. Unfortunately there is little coal mill data available so that most of
the few models available in the literature are qualitatively evaluated or checked
against a number of simple step responses. Some frequency response testing has
been performed (Neal et al., 1980), and it has been suggested by Corti et al. (1986)
that data collection was being carried out by ENEL in Italy.