Optimal Control for Quality Indices of Heat Furnace

Heat furnace is one of the most important parts in iron and steel industry which is one of the basic industries. The control of furnace quality indices has a direct impact on iron and steel qualities and energy consumptions in an iron and steel manufacturing process. Due to dramatic changes of exhaust gas in combustion, this multi-variable process becomes 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 quality indices control. In this paper, an optimization control method is proposed for the control of furnace quality indices. The optimization consists of a materials temperature calculation model, an optimization objective, an ideal materials heating model and a furnace heating model. Optimization algorithm consists of the maximum principle, the simulated annealing algorithm，the iterative algorithm and sensitive analysis.Finally, quality indices were controlled by lower layer loop control on-line.The proposed optimization control method has been successfully applied to some steel plants. The industrial applications show the effectiveness of the proposed method.