Hot-rolled strip laminar cooling process plant-wide temperature monitoring and control

The hot-rolled strip laminar cooling (HSLC) process is important to the production quality in hot-rolled strip product line. How to monitor the strip's transient temperature and accurately control the coiling temperature (CT) are the problems in HSLC since the strip temperature can hardly be measured inside the cooling section. In this paper, a modified EKF with trade-off feed-back coefficient is implemented to reconstruct the spatial distribution of strip temperature. It has the advantages of simple designation, having reasonable convergence rate and stability. Then a novel control strategy based on the designed EKF and model predictive control (MPC) is proposed for HSLC to improve the precision of CT. In MPC, a predictor is employed to predict the future temperature sequence at the inlet of fine cooling zone to further improve the performance of MPC. Finally, the reliability and performance of the proposed monitoring and control method were demonstrated by the experimentations in one HSLC manufactory. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.