Estimation of flow rate in automatic pouring system with real ladle used in industry

This paper gives a method for estimating flow rate of an outflow liquid from tilting-ladle type automatic pouring system used in casting industry. In order to precisely pour molten metal into the mold, controlling flow rate of liquid flowing out of the ladle is absolutely necessary. However, it is difficult to directly measure the flow rate by using a conventional flow meter, because the flow meter is damaged by the molten metal. Therefore, in this study, we used a soft sensing technique as part of the flow rate estimation system. In this approach, the pouring model is generalized to meet the ladle with diversity-shape. Then, the proposed model is incorporated in an Extended Kalman Filter for estimating the flow rate. The proposed system enables to apply the automatic pouring system with real ladle which has complicated shapes. The effectiveness of the proposed flow rate estimation system is demonstrated through experiments.