Hybrid intelligent control of heating furnaces for steel rolling process

Furnace temperature control has a direct impact on steel qualities and energy consumptions in a steel rolling process. Due to dramatic changes of combustion, this multi-variable process is time-varying, and also has inherent nonlinearities, couplings among the variables, large inertias and time delays. Therefore, manual operations are still being widely used in the furnace temperature control. In the paper, a two-layer control structure is proposed for furnace temperature control of steel rolling processes. This structure consists of an upper layer to set the desired temperature (setpoint) to be tracked by system output and a lower layer to stabilize the furnace temperature system. The proposed hybrid intelligent control method has been successfully applied to some steel plant in Gansu Province, China. The industrial applications verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.