Real-Time Measurement of Coke Aggregate Size and Vibrated Bulk Density Using Image Texture Analysis

The objective of this work is to develop a rapid and nondestructive machine vision sensor to predict Vibrated Bulk Density (VBD) of coke aggregate samples based on their surface textural characteristics obtained by imaging. This information could be useful for ultimately making real-time process adjustments to reduce green anode variability. Coke samples from different sources and sieved in a number of size classes were investigated individually and in blends. Wavelet Texture Analysis (WTA) was used to extract textural features of coke samples, and these were related to their VBD using Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression. It is shown that WTA captures variations in coke size and source and leads to good VBD predictions.