Optimal control strategy of working condition transition for copper flash smelting process

Because there are large state fluctuation of working conditions, excessive energy consumption caused by manual operation in the dynamic transient procedure for copper flash smelting process. Working conditions of copper flash smelting process must be adjusted to the complex and variable copper concentrate feeding to satisfy the smelting performance. Optimal control strategy based adjustment cost for copper flash smelting working condition transition is proposed, which can achieve the expected working condition by following the optimal working condition transition path. The Cauchy–Schwarz inequality-based two-level matching method is developed to set the expected working condition. Then with minimizing adjustment cost and restricting operation domain to optimize smelting performance indicators, the optimal control problem of working condition transition is converted into a multi-constraints optimization problem with two fixed ends. A Legendre pseudospectral-based optimization method is also presented to obtain the path of optimal working condition transition. The simulation results of actual production data collected are given to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed strategy.