“A Neuro-Fuzzy System for Modelling of a Bleaching Plant”

In paper industry, pulp bleaching is a most important concern in order to effectively respond to the high quality standards demanded by market requirements. Thus, a good knowledge of the bleaching plant is vital to achieve those goals. In this paper a neuro-fuzzy strategy is proposed to aid bleaching quality by predicting the outlet brightness. It consists of two phases: in the first one, a fuzzy clustering technique is applied to extract a set of fuzzy rules; in the second one, the centres and widths of the membership functions are tuned by means of a fuzzy neural network trained with backpropagation. This technique seems promising since it permits good results with large nonlinear plants. Furthermore, it describes the plant using a set of linguistic rules, which have the advantage of being closer to natural human language, so, more intuitive for operators. Preliminary promising results are presented and discussed.