Development and Estimation of a Burden Distribution Index for Monitoring a Blast Furnace Condition

A novel index representing burden distribution form in the blast furnace is developed and index estimation model is built with an empirical modeling method to monitor inner condition of the furnace without expensive sensors. To find the best combination of index and modeling method, two candidates for the index and four modeling methods have been examined. Results have shown that 3-D index have more resolution in describing the distribution form than 1-D index and ANN model produces smallest RMSE due to nonlinearity between the indices and charging mode. Although ANN has shown the best prediction accuracy in this study, PLS can be a good alternative due to its advantages in generalization capability, consistency, simplicity and training time. The second best result of PLS in the prediction results supports this fact.