Abstract:
To address prevailing industry pain points in traditional coal preparation plants—such as data silos, reliance on manual experience for production management, lagged process regulation, extensive safety and equipment operation and maintenance, and insufficient full-process intelligent collaboration—Xingmei Coal Preparation Plant underwent an intelligent upgrading and renovation. The project integrates multiple key technologies, including a smart cloud platform, an expert knowledge base driven by large language models, equipment health diagnostics, intelligent lubrication, digital twins, and intelligent regulation across critical process stages. Relying on an intelligent management and control platform, a bottom-up four-tier integrated architecture was established, comprising the foundational platform layer, foundational automation layer, intelligent control layer, and management decision-making layer, thereby completing the plant-wide deployment of intelligent perception and system integration. The application results demonstrate that post-renovation, the response speed of production management and control increased by over 60%, and the duration of equipment troubleshooting was shortened by 70%. The overall operational efficiency of the plant improved by more than 30%, and the service life of core equipment extended by over 20%. In terms of process indicators, the separation precision of dense medium cyclones increased by 8.3%, and the concentrate yield rose by 3.2 percentage points, generating an annual incremental economic benefit of 69.12 million yuan. Furthermore, the consumption of dense medium, flotation reagents, and flocculants per ton of coal decreased by 27%, 23% and 21% respectively, while the electricity consumption per ton of coal dropped from 10.5 kW·h to 9.5 kW·h. Unscheduled downtime was reduced by 98%, achieving zero accidents in safety production. The multi-technology fused four-tier integrated intelligent architecture effectively resolves the bottlenecks of traditional coal preparation management, achieving multi-dimensional improvements in quality, efficiency, and cost reduction across production, safety, O&M, and energy consumption. This project provides a replicable engineering model for the intelligent transformation of similar coal preparation plants.