Towards an Expert System for Powder Production Processes : (I) the Atomization Process

The practical definition for the expert system, as a system simulating the expert methods and knowledge in dealing with or manipulating special tasks is presented. The application of such a system in powder technology is attempted. The main features of the proposed system design are documented. It constitutes, actually, another part of an effort towards building an expert system for powder technology. It deals with the parameters of each powder production process, such as atomization, in relation to certain required powder’s characteristics. It extracts, and finds out the effect of each individual process parameter on the powder characteristics, and models and formulates these relations. The relational model, and the related system software modules are designed. The Structured Query Language (SQL) is used as a standard database management language, to build up the major block programs of the system software modules. The suggested expert system is meant to be flexible, easy to implement, modify and extend. The powder production by the atomization process is given as an example of how one can control the process parameters to get certain specific powder characteristics.