Evaluation strategy and mass balance for making decision about the amount of aluminum fluoride addition based on superheat degree

The purpose of aluminum fluoride (AlF3) addition is to adjust the superheat degree (SD) in the aluminum reduction process. Determining the appropriate amount of AlF3 to add has long been a challenging industrial issue as a result of its inherent complexity. Because of the decreasing number of experienced technicians, the manual addition of AlF3 is usually inexact, which easily leads to an unstable cell condition. In this paper, an evaluation strategy based on the SD for AlF3 addition is proposed. An extended naïve Bayesian classifier (ENBC) is designed to estimate the states of SD and its trends that represent the current and potential cell condition respectively, and then the process is graded by evaluating the estimated results based on fuzzy theory. The reduction process is divided into a few situations based on the evaluation grades, and mass balance is introduced to determine the amount of AlF3 addition in each situation. The results of experiments show that the proposed strategy is feasible, and the effectiveness of AlF3 addition is improved compared to the existing method. Moreover, automatic AlF3 addition is promising based on the proposed strategy.