ON-LINE MODELLING AND CONTROL SYSTEM FOR A REHEATING GAS FURNACE

摘要

At the SIDERCA seamless steel tube manufacturing plant, a gas furnace is used to reheat steel bars before piercing. In this process, the objective is to achieve a specified average temperature and temperature uniformity of the steel bars at the furnace outlet in the shortest cycle time. The Hefestos system was developed to achieve these goals with the help of an on-line mathematical model. New settings are periodically calculated by the model in order to minimize the deviation between the calculated and target bar temperatures. The model is run on two 486 PCs; the control module was installed at the beginning of 1995 and has operated regularly for several months.