Avaliação de Estruturas de Controle para Alimentadores com Elevado Tempo Morto em Transportadores de Correia na Mineração

In this work, control structures for regulating mass flow in feeders in conveyor belt circuits are discussed, in mining processes, when the dead time is high. In this case, dead time consists of the difference between the instant of the event of change of feeder speed and the instant of the detection event of the effect of this change in the flow measurement scale of this equipment. The motivation of this work is the search to obtain an increase in operational safety, avoiding flow values above the nominal reference values of the equipment, and to achieve the optimal use of the capacity of the mass transport circuits. The following control strategies are evaluated: Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller, Internal Model Controller (IMC) and Smith predictor. It is concluded that the use of the structure with Smith predictor, with feed mass adherence of 99,26%, had the best performance.