Dust Concentration Forecasting Method for Intermittent Processing of Powder and Granular Materials

Dust concentration during intermittent processing of powder and granular materials is characterized by high-frequency abrupt changes, local accumulation, and complex coupling among multiple sensors. Existing forecasting models still exhibit limitations in modeling global dependencies and characterizing local trends. To address these issues, this paper proposes an iTransformer-based dust concentration forecasting model that integrates a dual-stage feed-forward network and a DLinear branch. With iTransformer as the backbone network, the proposed model captures the coupling relationships among multi-source sensing signals through variate-wise modeling. A progressive dual-stage feed-forward feature refinement mechanism is constructed to enhance the model’s representation capability for transient variations and peak fluctuations in dust concentration. In addition, a collaborative modeling framework consisting of an iTransformer main branch and a DLinear auxiliary branch is designed to jointly learn global nonlinear features and local linear trends. An adaptive gated fusion mechanism is further introduced to dynamically allocate the contribution weights of different branches according to sequential characteristics. Experiments were conducted on a public 1 Hz smoke-sensing dataset, which was used as a proxy benchmark for high-frequency multivariate PM2.5 forecasting rather than direct industrial dust data. Under the setting of a 300-step input length and a 60-step forecasting horizon, the proposed model achieves an MSE of 1.8292 × 10−3, an MAE of 0.0334, an RMSE of 0.0428, an MAPE of 0.0177, and an R2 of 0.9744, outperforming the compared baseline models in overall performance. The results indicate that the proposed method improves overall forecasting accuracy and provides a methodological reference for sensor-driven particulate concentration forecasting and early warning, while further validation using field data from actual powder and granular material processing workshops is still required before practical deployment.