Application of Modern Control Strategies to Thermal Processes in Metal Industry

This paper addresses the development of advanced computer control strategies and those applications in the thermal processes of metal industry. The process modelling involves the development of dynamic mathematic models with state space forms describing the thermal state in the heated and/or cooled objects. Dynamic model based optimal control strategies for both batch and continuous thermal processes in terms of the maximum principle, dynamic programming, heuristic search, etc. are also proposed in this study. The target of the development of optimal control for the heating processes is to provide the optimal heating patterns based on the given criteria and constraints associated with dynamic models and others. A complete hierarchical computer control structure for heating processes is also proposed. Finally, the application results of the proposed modern control strategies to a production scale slab reheating furnace are given.