Controlling the treatment of mixtures comprising solid and liquid
AssigneeCoal Industry (Patents) Limited
InventorJohn Abbott
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Treatment equipment for mixtures comprising solid and liquid is controlled by determining a value comprising the cumulative mass throughput of solid and an inverse term comprising total treatment time, and monitoring said value substantially continuously until it substantially reaches a maximum.
Claims15
A method of controlling the treatment of a mixture of solid and liquid, comprising the steps of determining the mass flow rate of feed of untreated solid, determining the cumulative mass throughput of solids during running time, running time being the period of time in a treatment cycle during which the mixture feed is urged for treatment, determining a term comprising total treatment time, the total treatment time being the sum of running time and dead time, dead time being the period of time in a treatment cycle during which the mixture feed is not urged for treatment, determining the value comprising the cumulative mass throughput of solids divided by the total treatment time and monitoring said value until it reaches a maximum so that the treatment process is automatically optimized to provide a maximum throughput rate of treated solids.
Apparatus for controlling the treatment of a mixture of solid and liquid, comprising means for determining the mass flow rate of feed of untreated solid, means for determining the cumulative mass throughput of solid during running time, running time being the period of time in a treatment cycle during which the mixture feed is urged for treatment, said means including timer means for enabling a value of total treatment time to be determined, the total treatment time being the sum of running time and dead time, dead time being the period of time in a treatment cycle during which the mixture feed is not urged for treatment, means for determining a value comprising the cumulative mass throughput of solids divided by the total treatment time, and surveillance means for monitoring said determined value until it reaches a maximum so that the treatment process is automatically optimized to produce maximum throughput rate of treated solids.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.