On February 10, Train 8994 unloaded coal through a CD4 car dumper in Tianjin Port, marking the successful test of the port’s intelligent process control system in heavy-loaded condition .
The intelligent process control system was developed after three years’R&D. The heavy-load test broke new ground in intelligent control system for bulk handling in China. The application of the system will improve productivity by over 6 percent annually. Its main functions include checking the real-time location of conveyor, tracing coal flow status, automatic synchronization of conveyor scales, intelligent startup and shutdown of the operation, and online switch of the system. So far, development of all functions have been completed.
The coal tracing module has been in trial operation for over six months. During the period, the error for location tracing was below 10 meters and lower than 5‰ in weight calculation. The test results showed that the coal flow and weight of bulk materials at any location can be accurately measured, laying a foundation for the official running of the system in terms of bulk materials tracking. The intelligent process control module mainly includes smart multi-route selection, startup, material feeding, halt, and switching and so on. The heavy-load test checked the above functions under complicated operations including direct shiploading from car dumper, direct shiploading plus blending with reclaimers and automatic control in cabin switch. For the first time, seamless highly efficient switch among the car dumper, reclaimer, ship loader and stacker was achieved in China, paving the way for a dedicated coal port to realize an efficient operation model and laying important foundation for the company to become an intelligent and highly efficient port.
