• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.1006-1012
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• 2010

The hot rolling process ranks the highest position for production in steel making process. The hot strip manufacturing processes consist of the reheating furnace, roughing and finishing mill and coiler. The reheating furnace heats the slab. The roughing and finishing mill produce the hot strip from slab. The hot strip quality mainly depends on finishing mill, which consists of 4-high 7 stands. The looper is installed between stands and is used for controlling the strip tension by the looper angle for better material flow. It is difficult to control the strip tension with the coupled looper system from interaction between the looper angle and strip tension. Too much deviation of strip tension severely affects the poor width quality of the hot strip. It is important to control simultaneously both the looper angle and strip tension with each of their target values. This paper proposes the fuzzy tension control, which is developed to minimize the width deviation of the hot strip by maintaining the proper strip tension between stands and to achieve the stable operation of the coupled looper system. The fuzzy tension control performance is compared with the conventional PID control by experimental results.