Prediction of Soluble Al2O3 in Calcined Kaolin Using Infrared Spectroscopy and Multivariate Calibration

Adriana Guatame Garcia, Mike Buxton

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)
43 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In the production of calcined kaolin, the soluble Al2O3 content is used as a quality control criterion for some speciality applications. The increasing need for automated quality control systems in the industry has brought the necessity of developing techniques that provide (near) real-time data. Based on the understanding that the presence of water in the calcined kaolin detected using infrared spectroscopy can be used as a proxy for the soluble Al2O3 measurement, in this study, a hand-held infrared spectrometer was used to analyse a set of calcined kaolin samples obtained from a production plant. The spectra were used to predict the amount of soluble Al2O3 in the samples by implementing Partial Least Squares regression (PLS-R) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) as multivariate calibration methods. The presence of non-linearities in the dataset and the different types of association between water and the calcined kaolin represented the main challenges for developing a good calibration. In general, SVR showed a better performance than PLS-R, with Root Mean Squared Error of the cross-validation (RMSECV) = 0.046 wt.% and R2 = 0.87 for the best-achieved prediction. This accuracy level is adequate for detecting variation trends in the production of calcined kaolin which could be used not only as a quality control strategy but also for the optimisation of the calcination process.
Original languageEnglish
Article number136
Number of pages14
JournalMinerals - Open Access Mining & Mineral Processing Journal
Volume8
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Mar 2018

Keywords

  • soluble Al2O3
  • calcined kaolin
  • multivariate calibration
  • Support vector regression
  • Partial least squares regression
  • Infrared spectroscopy
  • OA-Fund TU Delft

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