Prediction of Blaine Fineness of Final Product in Cement Production Using Industrial Quality Control Data Based on Chemical and Granulometric Inputs Using Machine Learning

Abstract

The cement industry is central to sustainable manufacturing due to its high energy demand and associated CO2 emissions. In cement production, a substantial share of electrical energy is consumed in the clinker grinding circuit, where Blaine fineness (specific surface area, cm2/g), a key quality output, affects both cement performance and specific energy consumption. However, laboratory Blaine measurements are typically available with a 30-60 min delay, which limits timely process interventions and may promote conservative operating practices (e.g., precautionary over-grinding) to secure quality. This study develops machine-learning models to predict the finished-product Blaine fineness (Blaine-F) from routinely recorded industrial quality-control inputs, including XRF-based oxide composition, derived chemical moduli (lime saturation factor, LSF; silica modulus, SM; alumina modulus, AM), laser-diffraction particle-size distribution descriptors (Q10/Q50/Q90 corresponding to D10/D50/D90 percentile diameters; and R3 residual fractions at selected cut sizes), and intermediate in-process fineness (Blaine-P). The models were trained on over 200 finished-product samples obtained from the quality-control laboratory information management system (LIMS) of Seza Cement Factory (SYCS Group, Turkey). Ridge regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost were tuned using RandomizedSearchCV with five-fold cross-validation and evaluated on a held-out test set using MAE, RMSE, and R2. The results show that the linear baseline provides limited explanatory power (Ridge: R2 approximate to 0.50), consistent with the strongly non-linear behavior of the grinding-separation system, whereas tree-based ensemble methods achieve higher predictive accuracy. XGBoost yields the best overall performance (R2 = 0.754; RMSE = 76.9 cm2/g), while Random Forest attains R2 = 0.744 with the lowest MAE (61.7 cm2/g). Explainability analyses indicate that Blaine-F is primarily influenced by the fine-tail PSD descriptor Q10 (D10 particle size) and the intermediate fineness Blaine-P, whereas chemistry-related variables (e.g., LSF and SiO2, and particularly SM) provide secondary yet meaningful contributions. These findings support the use of the proposed model as a virtual sensor to reduce decision latency associated with delayed laboratory Blaine measurements and to enable tighter fineness targeting. Potential energy and CO2 implications should be quantified using site-specific, plant-calibrated relationships between kWh/t and Blaine fineness, rather than inferred as measured outcomes within the present study.