Temperature control of glass melting furnace with fuzzy logic and conventional PI control

This paper presents a practical application of fuzzy logic control of the temperature of glass-melting furnace. Because of the complexity and nonlinearity, temperature control of glass-melting furnace is still delegated to human operator. Though the overall characteristics of glass-melting furnace are complex and nonlinear, one portion of the furnace characteristics can be modeled as a linear system. The linear portion of the furnace dynamics is modeled with a first-order-plus-dead-time (FOPDT) system and a PI controller is applied to the FOPDT model. The remaining complex and nonlinear portion of the furnace dynamics is covered by the fuzzy system, i.e., rules of human experts. The PI controller and fuzzy system are combined in cascade. Practical implementation results of Samsung-Corning Company showed the effectiveness of proposed control algorithm