Software sensor for slab reheating furnace

It has long been thought that a reheating furnace, with its inherent measurement difficulties and complex dynamics, posed almost insurmountable problems to engineers in steel plants. A novel software sensor is proposed to make more effective use of those measurements that are already available, which has great importance both to slab quality and energy saving. The proposed method is based on the mixtures of Gaussian processes (GP) with the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm employed for parameter estimation of the mixture of models. The mixture model can alleviate the computational complexity of GP and also accords with the changes of operating condition in practical processes. It is demonstrated by on-line estimation of the furnace gas temperature in 1580 reheating furnace in Baosteel Corporation (Group).