Calculation method and its application for energy consumption of ball mills in ceramic industry based on power feature deployment

Owing to the lack of effective energy consumption models of ball mills in the ceramic industry, a calculation model to forecast energy consumption of ceramic ball mills during the grinding process was developed based on power feature deployment. The energy consumption of the working process was defined by different combinations of power of components involved in tasks. The total energy consumption was divided into three parts: power lost in the electrical motor, power lost in mechanical transmission and power used for grinding materials. These three components were described separately by taking the principle of an electrical motor, mechanical transmission and grinding process into account. Measurement results of two ball mills in a real ceramic manufacturing plant showed that the proposed calculation models could achieve an accuracy of more than 96% for predicting the ball mill energy consumption during which the power fluctuates periodically to complete one rotation cycle of the ball mills.