Adaptive control method and experimental study of cone crusher based on aggregate online detection

The size of the discharge outlet of a cone crusher directly impacts the size of the aggregate produced. However, the discharge outlet is still adjusted manually, which has a significant error and affects production efficiency. For this reason, this study proposed an adaptive control method for cone crushers based on aggregate online detection. Firstly, the aggregate image was segmented using an instance segmentation model and the anchor and structure of the model were optimised. Then, this study proposed an evaluation method for quickly and accurately assessing the overall segmentation effect of network models. By comparing the results with those before optimisation, the accuracy of the optimised network model was improved from 0.923 to 0.940. Finally, an adaptive control experiment was conducted based on the online aggregate detection results. The experimental results showed that the discharge particle size distribution of the cone crusher becomes more stable after intelligent control is added, with the variance of the proportion of cumulative gradation at 15 mm decreased from 34.3 to 14.4. These results indicated that the developed adaptive control system effectively controls the fine processing of coarse aggregates and significantly improves the quality of aggregate crushing and processing.