Abstract

PAREDES, J.; CEPEDA, J.  and  LOZADA, J.. Parameters for the Grinding Process in Vertical Mills Using Optimization Methods. Revista Técnica energía [online]. 2024, vol.20, n.2, pp.90-97. ISSN 2602-8492.  https://doi.org/10.37116/revistaenergia.v20.n2.2024.594.

Vertical roller mills, (VRM), are widely used for grinding raw materials in factories engaged in the extraction and processing of minerals. Any machine used for grinding or crushing consumes around 30 to 40% of the energy of a factory. The loading pressure, table rotation speed, moisture content, outlet temperature and pressure rollers are variables that can be controlled to decrease the specific energy consumption Ecs. This paper poses an optimization problem in order to reduce the energy consumption of a VRM used to produce cement and to find the optimal parameters of the operating variables. Several packages are used to solve the nonlinear programming problem, with very good results in terms of accuracy and speed of convergence, but those provided by the Pyomo package are used because it obtains more accurate results. Comparing the result of the objective function with the energy consumption of a well-known cement company in Ecuador, it is concluded that the optimized parameters are able to reduce by 25% the energy consumption guaranteeing a minimum production of 2200 tons of cement per day, so the model is correctly validated.

Keywords : efficiency; grinding process; optimization; vertical mill.

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