Introduction
Blast furnace manufacture is the basis of today's ferrous metallurgy. Despite of essential lacks (need of chemical-recovery production and ore-dressing, lots of ecological problems, high operating and maintenance costs) there is no real alternative to switch to. So, optimization of blast furnace technology to become more effective and safe is issue of current importance.
Modern technological revolution allowed to find lots of solutions, but still huge amount of work have to done.
Purposes and Tasks
The work subject is development of algorithms of automatic check and failure detection system for chute-type blast furnace charging mechanism.
Infrared thermography system is the information source about monitoring object's state.
Motivation
The world market competition is making modern electronic and computer revolution lead to the automation of blast furnace manufacturing processes, which resulted in better quality management and close specification control along with a considerable decrease in the cost per piece of the product.
In modern conditions metal industry development is characterized by wide application of new technologies to production. IT-industry is the basis for such move forward. Computer systems allows to work on information gather and store, automatic analysis and solution finding [1].
Thousands of parameters are describing blast furnace production process. Unfortunately, still there is no fully computer controlled manufacturing. Instead it is computer aided one. Last decision is taken by operators. Total control of technological processes inside blast furnace is the way to creating computer supervised system [2].
Except process automation a problem of high importance is failure detection. For example, break down of charging cute.
Infrared thermography application allows to spend supervision over processes which occur on a top of the furnace material surface and over it [3] [4]. Such system is the way to control many parameters of technological process: surface temperatures, its height, speed of a material descent, to build representation about gas distribution and some other features [5].
One of the main advantages of the infrared thermography system is possibility of visual observing of the furnace interior. Such images contain information about current charging-chute position, its presence and form. With these parameters operator can fix corruption or even break of chute.
Development of the computer system to monitor such dangerous situation increases stability and safety of manufacturing.
So, creating of automation control system allowing to raise efficiency and safety of production is the actual task.
Scientific novelty
Scientific novelty of the work consists in the researches and technique for the integrity control of chute of the blast furnace charge mechanism and also developed algorithms for this task.
Practical value
Practical value of this work is in its results which allows to develop a real system of blast furnace chute-type charging system integrity check to diagnose defined types of failures and prevent critical damaging of manufacturer's equipment.
Brief technology overview
Infrared Thermography (thermal imaging, thermographic imaging) is a type of imaging by detection of radiation in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum (roughly 900–14,000 nanometers or 0.9–14 µm) [6]. Infrared radiation is emitted by all objects based on their temperatures, thermography makes it possible to visualize environment. The amount of radiation emitted by an object increases with temperature, therefore thermography allows to see variations in temperature [7] [8].
There is a lot of infrared themography applictions:
- Condition monitoring;
- Medical imaging;
- Pollution detection;
- Search and rescue activites;
- Night vision;
- Process control;
- Chemical imaging.
In this work infrared themography is used for non-destructive testing of blast furnace charging chute.
Illustrations 1 and 2 shows furnace interior images made by the infrared camera.
Figure 1 — Blast furnace interior infrared vision
(JSC «Alchevsk Iron & Steel Works»)
Figure 2 — Blast furnace interior infrared vision
(HSV colormap) (JSC «Alchevsk Iron & Steel Works»)
The pattern recognition system have to be able to:
- check charging-chute presence;
- fix its coordinates;
- define its form
- monitoring of integrity.
Conclusion
By the time of abstract writing, master's work is not yet finished. Now the analysis of the problem is done, clearly recognized the tasks and conditions and the ways of solution are found.
The work is to be done until December 2009.
References
- Информационные системы в металлургии: Конспект лекций (отдельные главы из учебника для вузов) / Н.А.Спирин, В.В.Лавров. Екатеринбург: Уральский государственный технический университет – УПИ, 2004. – 495 с.
- Познание процессов доменной плавки, под ред. И. В. Большакова и И. Г. Товаровского, Днепропетровск: ПОРОГИ, 2006, – 439 с.
- Sabih D Khan Process and Control of BF Process (Computer Integrated Extraction) [Электронный ресурс] / Khwarzimic Science Society, - http://www.khwarzimic.org/takveen/blast_furnace.pdf
- Mobley R. K. An introduction to predictive maintenance. Butterworth-Heinemann: Elsevier Science, 2002, - 459 p.
- Стевич З., Райчич-Вуясинович М., Антич Д.В., Дамнянович З. Современная инфракрасная термография в контроле и диагностике оборудования [Электронный ресурс] / Національна бібліотека України імені В. І. Вернадського, – http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/portal/natural/tkea/texts/2006_3/p56-58.pdf
- Википедия. Термография [Электронный ресурс] / http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Термография
- IRIS Associates. How Does Infrared Thermography Work? [Электронный ресурс] / Сайт IRIS Associates, - http://www.irisinfrared.com/How Does It Work.htm
- Wikipedia. Thermographic camera [Электронный ресурс] / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermographic_camera