Trends in furnace control

This paper relates Italimpianti's experiences over the past few years in the area of control of reheat furnaces for the steel industry. The focus is on the level 1 area; specifically on the use of PLC-based systems to perform both combustion control and mechanical/hydraulic control. Some topics to be discussed are: overview of reheat furnace control system requirements; PLC only control vs separate PLC and DCS systems; PLC hardware requirements; man machine interface (MMI) requirements; purge, light-on and safety logic; implementation of more sophisticated level 1 control algorithms; furnace temperature optimization: look up tables vs full thermal modeling; and recent trends including integrated PLC/DCS system.