Research ArticleOnline monitoring and control of particle size in the grinding process using least square support vector regression and resilient back propagation neural network

•Comparison of outlier detection and subset selection methods.•Development of BPNN, RBFN, GRNN and LS-SVR models of vertical roller mill.•Comparison of the developed models on multiple statistical parameters.•Online outlier detection, real time monitoring and control of cement fineness.

Particle size soft sensing in cement mills will be largely helpful in maintaining desired cement fineness or Blaine. Despite the growing use of vertical roller mills (VRM) for clinker grinding, very few research work is available on VRM modeling. This article reports the design of three types of feed forward neural network models and least square support vector regression (LS-SVR) model of a VRM for online monitoring of cement fineness based on mill data collected from a cement plant. In the data pre-processing step, a comparative study of the various outlier detection algorithms has been performed. Subsequently, for model development, the advantage of algorithm based data splitting over random selection is presented. The training data set obtained by use of Kennard-Stone maximal intra distance criterion (CADEX algorithm) was used for development of LS-SVR, back propagation neural network, radial basis function neural network and generalized regression neural network models. Simulation results show that resilient back propagation model performs better than RBF network, regression network and LS-SVR model. Model implementation has been done in SIMULINK platform showing the online detection of abnormal data and real time estimation of cement Blaine from the knowledge of the input variables. Finally, closed loop study shows how the model can be effectively utilized for maintaining cement fineness at desired value.