Process control strategies for a steel making furnace using ANN with bayesian regularization and ANFIS

This paper illustrates the control strategies of an Electric Arc Furnace. It involves the prediction of the control action which aids in reduction of carbon, manganese and other impurities from the in-process molten steel. Predictive models using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with Bayesian Regularization and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) were developed. The control action is the amount of oxygen to be lanced at different sampling instants. The predictive models were constructed based on the values of the individual chemical constituents of the collected molten samples. Two control strategies were devised: one with full sampling and the other with limited or reduced sampling. For the full sampling case two predictive models were devised separately with ANN with Bayesian Regularization and ANFIS. For the limited sampling strategy a combination of ANN with Bayesian Regularization and ANFIS were employed. For full sampling strategy, ANFIS model performs better than ANN. The application of the limited sampling strategy gave satisfactory Mean Percentage Error (MPE) thereby justifying its practical implementation. The main advantage of reduced or limited sampling is that it helps in the reduction of cost, time and manpower associated the sample collection and its subsequent analysis.