Comparative Study of Estimation Methods of the Endpoint Temperature in Basic Oxygen Furnace Steelmaking Process with Selection of Input Parameters

The basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steelmaking process in the steel industry is highly complicated, and subject to variations in raw material composition. During the BOF steelmaking process, it is essential to maintain the carbon content and the endpoint temperature at their set points in the liquid steel. This paper presents intelligent models used to estimate the endpoint temperature in the basic oxygen furnace (BOF) steelmaking process. An artificial neural network (ANN) model and a least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) model are proposed and their estimation performance compared. The classical partial least-squares (PLS) method was also compared with the others. Results of the estimations using the ANN, LSSVM and PLS models were compared with the operation data, and the root-mean square error (RMSE) for each model was calculated to evaluate estimation performance. The RMSE of the LSSVM model 15.91, which turned out to be the best estimation. RMSE values for the ANN and PLS models were 17.24 and 21.31, respectively, indicating their relative estimation performance. The essential input parameters used in the models can be selected by sensitivity analysis. The RMSE for each model was calculated again after a sequential input selection process was used to remove insignificant input parameters. The RMSE of the LSSVM was then 13.21, which is better than the previous RMSE with all 16 parameters. The results show that LSSVM model using 13 input parameters can be utilized to calculate the required values for oxygen volume and coolant needed to optimally adjust the steel target temperature.