EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

In order to optimize the conduction of steel billets reheating furnaces, advanced multivariable process control techniques are needed so as to guarantee a suitable handling of all furnace conditions. The final goal is the achievement of energy efficiency while preserving product quality: a profitable tradeoff between energy saving, environmental impact decreasing and throughput maximization has to be assured. When implementing a new control system on a process plant, the operators’ training phase can be a very crucial phase both from the system safety point of view and for the actual acceptance of the new (automatic) advanced controller by human operators. All these aspects finally affect the service factor of the i.Process/Steel-RHF Advanced Process Control (APC) system. i.Process/Steel-RHF is an advanced control tool for reheating furnaces based on an adaptive Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy. To maximize field performances, special efforts have been dedicated to the development, jointly to the APC system, of an ad hoc training framework that moreover could assure a significant speed up of the operators’ training phase. In this way, tedious and repeated meetings with the control system developers are avoided. Particular effort has been put, during the APC system development, to the detection of significant process behaviors that needed particular explanation to operators for their acceptance. This concurrent engineering approach has resulted to be particularly effective in the development of the training tool.