ABSTRACT
Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield SI 3JD, UK
5.1. INTRODUCTION
As is well known, a large amount of energy in the steel industry is consumed in reheat furnaces for heating steel stock to achieve the required rolling temperature. The reheating process is still an important part in the iron and steel industry, although nowadays many modem steel processes are trying to employ slab (ingot) hot direct rolling which (partially) avoids the reheat furnaces. There are still a considerable number of steel mills where reheat furnaces are essentially used to produce hot slabs for the subsequent rolling mills. Energy consumption by the reheat furnaces is huge and it absorbs a significant part of the total operational costs. Furthermore, the quality of reheating operation has a significant effect on the downstream mill operation as well as on the quality of the final product. Due to the importance of this process, much research has been carried out in modelling, optimization, and control of the reheat furnaces [1-8]. Some of the research has concentrated on the model development of the heating process, while other has focused on the control strategies aimed at heating quality and energy optimization. However, research on integrated control, instrumentation and optimization of the reheating process, together with the consideration of the rolling mill operation dynamics has not been sufficient, despite the fact that the potential benefit of doing so is apparent.
