A vibrational approach to Slag Sensing System: development and industrial application

Abstract Today the increased competitiveness of global market forces companies to provide products and services with quality standards ever higher at lower costs. In this sense, both technological development and innovation, as strategic factor, drive companies to invest in development of smart applications that allows to increase global efficiency and improves the quality, understood as satisfaction of the client. In Continuous Casting Production (CCP), for example, this means Slag Sensing System (SSS) improvement in order to obtain better purity of molten steel and at the same time to reduce the maintenance costs associated with the implantation of casting. After an overview of SSS currently used in industry, this paper deals with vibrational analysis and characterization of the process of CCP to develop an on-line real-time application of vibrational method for slag detection. At first time domain and frequency domain analysis is performed to characterize the vibrations associated with the plant, subsequently, on the base of obtained results, a control algorithm is developed and the related software is coded, in order to drive the closing of the nozzle valve in a real industrial application.