Development and Implementation of an Advanced Storage Model

Abstract:

The European process industry is in need of modernization if it shall retain its competitiveness on the growing global market and at the same time reduce the environmental impact that the industrial activities have. The concept behind industrial automation has been very successful in increasing the efficiency for the material handling process, but some industries still have a lack in the field of automation. One of these industries is the mining industry.

ABB is currently working within the EU-funded project DISIRE in order to increase the amount of traceability and therefore also the potential of automation in the mining industry by introducing a flow simulation over the mine infrastructure. But one of the largest inherited problems that this industry has over other process industries is that the flow partly consists of a batch structure where the continuous flows of the product only takes place between bunkers and buffer zones.

ABB has developed a Matlab simulation where these bunkers are modelled by a simple queue algorithm which does not take the blending or time delays of the ore into account. The main task of this master thesis was to investigate which different modelling approaches that could increase the accuracy of the simulation. The Cellular Automata (CA) were found to be most suitable modelling approach due to its simplicity and a Matlab toolbox were developed and implemented based on the theories behind CA. The results were partly evaluated with the results of an ongoing experiment at Luleå university and by comparison to theories of granular media movement. The CPU-time for the silo flow with 10.000 particles in a flat silo using a MacBook Pro 2.26GHz was about 8 seconds.