Temperature control for thermal treatment of aluminum alloy in a large-scale vertical quench furnace

The temperature control of the large-scale vertical quench furnace is very difficult due to its huge volume and complex thermal exchanges. To meet the technical requirement of the quenching process, a temperature control system which integrates temperature calibration and temperature uniformity control is developed for the thermal treatment of aluminum alloy workpieces in the large-scale vertical quench furnace. To obtain the aluminum alloy workpiece temperature, an air heat transfer model is newly established to describe the temperature gradient distribution so that the immeasurable workpiece temperature can be calibrated from the available thermocouple temperature. To satisfy the uniformity control of the furnace temperature, a second order partial differential equation (PDE) is derived to describe the thermal dynamics inside the vertical quench furnace. Based on the PDE, a decoupling matrix is constructed to solve the coupling issue and decouple the heating process into multiple independent heating subsystems. Then, using the expert control rule to find a compromise of temperature rising time and overshoot during the quenching process. The developed temperature control system has been successfully applied to a 31 m large-scale vertical quench furnace, and the industrial running results show the significant improvement of the temperature uniformity, lower overshoot and shortened processing time.

[1]  Xuan Zhou,et al.  Multivariable temperature measurement and control system of large-scaled vertical quench furnace based on temperature field , 2004 .

[2]  Hyochoong Bang,et al.  The Finite Element Method Using MATLAB , 1996 .

[3]  Liang Lie-quan.  Dynamically decoupling control algorithm of temperature DPS in large-scale vertical quench furnace , 2007 .

[4]  Weihua Gui,et al.  Neural adaptive PSD decoupling controller and its application in three-phase electrode adjusting system of submerged arc furnace , 2013 .

[5]  Daejun Chang,et al.  Efficiency analysis of radiative slab heating in a walking-beam-type reheating furnace , 2011 .

[6]  Weihua Gui,et al.  Temperature Uniformity Control of Large-Scale Vertical Quench Furnaces for Aluminum Alloy Thermal Treatment , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[7]  Tianyou Chai,et al.  Hybrid intelligent control for optimal operation of shaft furnace roasting process , 2011 .

[8]  Yongsheng Ding,et al.  An Intelligent Bi-Cooperative Decoupling Control Approach Based on Modulation Mechanism of Internal Environment in Body , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[9]  M. Orzylowski,et al.  Precise temperature control for measurement purposes , 1999, IMTC/99. Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (Cat. No.99CH36309).

[10]  Wen Ding-du.  Decoupling control of electric heating furnace temperature based on DRNN neural network , 2010, 2010 2nd International Conference on Electronic Computer Technology.

[11]  Arun Ghosh,et al.  Open-Loop Decoupling of MIMO Plants , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[12]  Haralambos Sarimveis,et al.  Model predictive temperature control in long ducts by means of a neural network approximation tool , 2007 .

[13]  Andreas Kugi,et al.  Nonlinear model predictive control of a continuous slab reheating furnace , 2013 .

[14]  Liulin Cao,et al.  Control and modeling of temperature distribution in a tubular polymerization process , 2007, Comput. Chem. Eng..

[15]  Meng Xiao-feng,et al.  Temperature decoupling control of double-level air flow field dynamic vacuum system based on neural network and prediction principle , 2013 .

[16]  J. Ward,et al.  Zone modelling of the thermal performances of a large-scale bloom reheating furnace , 2013 .

[17]  Wei-hua Gui,et al.  Vertical quench furnace Hammerstein fault predicting model based on least squares support vector machine and its application , 2009, 2009 Chinese Control and Decision Conference.

[18]  J. Reddy,et al.  The Finite Element Method in Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics , 1994 .