InImpact: The Journal of Innovation Impact

Publisher Future Technology Press
Vol. 7 No. 2 KES Transactions on SDM I - Sustainable Design and Manufacturing 2014
Volume Editors KES International
Journal ISSN 2051-6002
 
Article TitleA Methodology for Automated Pellet size Distribution in a Pellet Mill
Primary AuthorDavid James, Swansea University
Other Author(s) Mauro Innocente; John Cherry; Marc Holmes; Steve Brown; Nick Lavery
Pages 732 - 743
Article ID sdm14-108
Publication Date 01-May-16
AbstractIn this work the feasibility of pellet size distribution using images captured from the operator’s sight glass of the moving pellet bed using a standard digital camera is investigated. The pellet size distribution is determined using a bespoke circle detection program which is able to fit circles to pellet edges, neural networks are used to match predicted distributions to actual distributions and discrete element modelling is used to create a large quantity of rendered images with known distributions for network training. The results show that the circle detection algorithm is able to find a high percentage of pellets in an image and find their sizes. Neural networks are then able to use the predicted pellet size distributions to give a good prediction of the actual distributions and are able to account for segregation effects in the pellet beds. This demonstrates that an online pellet sizing scheme is feasible in nickel pellet production
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