A Billet Heat Transfer Modeling during Reheating Furnace Operation

Reheating furnace is an essential facility of a rod mill plant where a billet is heated to the required rolling temperature so that it can be milled to produce wire. Sometimes, it is also necessary to control a transient billet temperature pattern according to the material characteristics to prevent a wire from breaking. Though it is very important objective to obtain a correct information of a billet temperature during furnace operation. Consequently, a billet temperature profile must be estimated. In this paper, a billet heat transfer model based on FEM (Finite Element Method) with spatially distributed emission factors is proposed and a measurement is also carried out for two different furnace operation conditions. Finally, the difference between the model outputs and the measurements is minimized by using the new optimization algorithm named uDEAS(Univariate Dynamic Encoding Algorithm for Searches) with multi-step tuning strategy. Hence, the information of billet temperatures can be obtained by using proposed model on various furnace operation conditions.