Temperature Control of a Reheating Furnace using Feedback Linearization and Predictive Control

Reheating furnace is a facility of heating up the billet to desired high temperature in the hot charge rolling process and it consists of 3 zones. Temperature control of reheating furnace is essential for successful rolling performance and high productivity. Mostly, temperature control is carried out using PID controller However, the PID control is not effective due to the nonlinearity of the reheating furnace(i.e, presence of the interference of neighboring zones and slow response of temperature etc.). In this paper, feedback linearization method is applied to obtain a linear model of the reheating furnace. Then, controller is designed using simple predictive control method. The effectiveness of this strategy is shown through simulations.