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2, MARCH 1998
Abstract This paper deals with the problem of molten the development of different advanced control strategies which
metal level control in continuous casting. Under normal have been implemented with variable success. For example,
circumstances, proportional integral derivative (PID) control the use of a pole-placement design of a general linear regulator
performs quite well, but abnormal conditions (in particular
nozzle clogging/unclogging) require manual intervention. Indeed, is studied in [6]. Based on the use of a process model, pre-
when the flow of matter into the mold increases suddenly, dictive control has also been considered [5], [20]. References
the PID controller is not always able to prevent large level [10] and [8] propose a nonlinear physical model that allows the
variations that can even lead to mold overflow. So, a fuzzy identification of nonlinearities responsible for the mold level
controller has been designed using the expert knowledge of the
operators for controlling the process during disturbed phases. oscillations observed. Alternative compensation strategies are
The paper discusses both the design of the fuzzy logic controller then derived to achieve an improved level control.
and its integration with the PID in a global control architecture. In addition to these so-called classical techniques, alterna-
Results from simulation and successful online implementation tive methods based on the use of expert knowledge have been
are presented. proposed. Their principal objective is to take advantage of the
Index TermsContinuous casting, fuzzy control, metals indus- expert ability for the design of the mold level controller. In
try, proportional control, weighted rules. particular, the applications involving fuzzy logic in the mold
level control loop are more and more numerous. A distinction
I. INTRODUCTION can be made between two levels of use of fuzzy logic.
High Level: The fuzzy controller acts as a supervisor that
T ODAY iron and steel producers pay particular attention
to mold level control in the process of steel production
by continuous casting. Indeed, the correlation between the
adjusts a proportional integral derivative (PID) controller
[18], [2] or as a diagnostic expert system that provides
performance of mold level control and the surface quality an assessment of the level control performance and detects
of the final product is now widely acknowledged [3], [16], possible perturbations [17].
[11]. However, obtaining an accurate level control remains Low Level: Fuzzy logic is used directly for the level control,
a critical issue. A performant regulation has indeed to take in particular to deal with perturbations which the traditional
into consideration the effects of process variation over time controllers fail to master, such as powder addition disturbing
and process nonlinearities. Furthermore, it has to be able to the level measurement [21] or nozzle clogging/unclogging
get rid of the different perturbations that affect the continuous strongly affecting the process behavior [21], [7], [13]. The
casting process. In this framework, various control strategies last two references [7] and [13] describe a structure with
have been developed whose common purpose is to compensate both a PID traditional controller and a fuzzy controller,
a particular characteristic of the continuous casting process used in parallel.
(time variations, nonlinearities, disturbances). The remaining This paper presents an application of low level use of fuzzy
part of this section gives a brief overview of previous studies logic for level control of melting metal in the production
and presents the paper aim and contents. process of a semifinished product by continuous casting. The
As PID controllers have been installed at most steel plants application consists in dealing with sudden nozzle unclogging,
in the world and still prevail widely today, various attempts which is a major perturbing phenomenon in the production
have been made to improve their performances. For example, process of slabs by continuous casting for some specific steel
[14] deals with the adaptation of the gains of a PID controller grades. The principle of the strategy is to use a PID controller
according to casting parameters such as slab width or extrac- that answers satisfactorily in most cases, while keeping in
tion speed. In [18] and [12], a self-adaptation of the gains is the background a fuzzy controller which is ready to take
proposed. In [4], a master/slave loop is implemented in order over from the PID controller when severe perturbations occur.
to eliminate slow mold level oscillations that are commonly The proposed implementation is based on a linguistic fuzzy
observed in continuous casters. As these unwanted oscillations controller whose design is derived from the expert knowledge.
tend to cause surface defects in the final product, particular After a detailed description of steel continuous casting
attention is paid to their suppression. This objective has guided [1], particularly for slab production, Section II presents the
Manuscript received Janaury 1997; revised October 1997. different components of the mold level control loop and
M. Dussud is with SERT, 69150 Decines, France. the nozzle clogging/unclogging phenomena. For simulation
S. Galichet and L. P. Foulloy are with LAMII/CESALP, BP 806, 74016
Annecy Cedex, France. purposes, a global process model is derived that includes
Publisher Item Identifier S 1063-6536(98)02067-3. time varying perturbations for taking into account the nozzle
10636536/98$10.00 1998 IEEE
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DUSSUD et al.: FUZZY LOGIC CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD 247
clogging/unclogging phenomena. Section III is devoted to the a water-cooled copper mold with several strands (two
integration of a fuzzy controller into the control loop. First, strands, in general, for slab casting),
a global control structure is proposed including both the PID a roll system to drive and bend the semifinished steel
controller and the fuzzy one. Then, the fuzzy controller design product.
is clarified step by step. Results from simulation and successful Liquid steel is delivered in a ladle to the casting floor
online implementation are presented in Section IV. The final and then poured at a controlled rate into the tundish. At
section contains a general conclusion. the bottom of the tundish, the molten metal flows through
II. OVERVIEW OF CONTINUOUS CASTING PROCESS several submerged entry nozzles and fills the mold. Solid-
ification of the liquid steel starts in the water-cooled mold
A. General Description and progressively continues as the strand moves through the
The process under consideration is illustrated in Fig. 1 (for casting machine (secondary spray cooling). The mold has an
details, see [1]). Essentially, a casting machine consists of: oscillatory movement of a few millimeters magnitude and
a liquid metal reservoir: the ladle (about 300 T for slab a frequency close to 1 Hz which makes metal extraction
casting), easier. On the top surface of the liquid metal, powder is
a distribution system: the tundish (about 40 T for slab added to prevent oxidization and heat loss and to lubricate
casting), the mold.
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248 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 2, MARCH 1998
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DUSSUD et al.: FUZZY LOGIC CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD 249
As an indication for the reader and as a basis for simulations, formalism has been chosen to implement the level regulation
the possible brackets have been observed in a perturbed context.
Fig. 7 describes the global structure implemented. Both con-
to h
trollers concurrently deliver the evaluated control action. This
to mm multicontroller structure requires the presence of a decision-
making algorithm, which can detect unclogging occurrences
The transfer function has been used to modelize and activates the fuzzy controller when necessary.
the dynamics of unclogging. In practice, s. An easy way to understand the switching strategy is to
study the trajectory followed by the system when unclogging
III. APPLICATION OF FUZZY LOGIC occurs. Fig. 8 gives an illustration of such a trajectory in the
CONTROL TO NOZZLE UNCLOGGING phase plane. A PID controller is assumed and the simulation
is achieved by using the previously presented model with
A. Control Strategy additional white noise on the level measure. By empirical
identification, it is rather easy to distinguish the zone of
Level control is usually performed with a PID controller.
normal behavior of the process, correctly controlled by the
This conventional method is sufficient in most cases, espe-
PID controller (rectangle around the setpoint), and the zone
cially during steady-state phases. However, because of sudden
that requires implementing a different control strategy.
unclogging of the submerged nozzle, the steel flow increases
The switching strategy is then simply based on the following
very quickly, inducing a rising level in the mold that the PID
statement:
may not be able to control. In order to avoid a mold overflow, a
human operator substitutes for the PID controller and correctly
If the system has a normal behavior
adjusts the stopper-rod position. Hence, the human operators
have the expert knowledge for controlling the process during then PID control is used,
these transient phases. That is the reason why a fuzzy control otherwise fuzzy control is activated (1)
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250 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 2, MARCH 1998
Fig. 8. Trajectory in the phase plane during unclogging with the PID controller.
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DUSSUD et al.: FUZZY LOGIC CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD 251
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252 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 2, MARCH 1998
Fig. 14. Global structure of the fuzzy controller. Fig. 15. Partition of the input universes of discourse.
is opened when the level is decreasing even if the level First of all, the meaning attributed to each linguistic term
is above the setpoint. It can be noticed that the definition has to be defined, that is, a numerical fuzzy set has to
of the two anticipatory rules requires the definition of be associated with each term. The fuzzy meaning [22] of a
two new linguistic terms (NS and PS) for the error linguistic term is then characterized by its membership
description. They represent, respectively, subclasses of function denoted or more simply . Thus, for any
N(egative) and P(ositive) errors. measurement represents the grade of membership
4 The fourth and last step consists in tuning the fuzzy with which belongs to the fuzzy meaning of the linguistic
controller. Indeed, once the rulebase has been defined, term . The determination of the fuzzy meaning of each
the link between the linguistic and numeric representa- linguistic term may be viewed as the partitioning of the input
tions has to be established. This is done by defining universes of discourse. Fig. 15 illustrates this partitioning step
the fuzzy meaning attributed to each linguistic term. for the application input variables (error and change in error).
The fuzzy controller tuning also requires to balance It can be noticed that the error is described by the single
anticipatory actions as compared with natural actions. linguistic term Small when the numeric error belongs to
This was done by assigning a weight to each expert rule. [ 9,9]. According to the rulebase given in Fig. 12, the dead
Furthermore, the introduction of rule weights makes it zone is thus defined as the band where the numeric error
possible to keep in a single rulebase several rules with belongs to [ 9,9]. In the same way, an anticipative action
the same antecedent but different conclusions without can be generated when the numeric error belongs to [9, 25]
any contradiction. For example, the following two rules or [ 25, 9]. In this case, as Positive Small (or Negative
extracted from the rulebase of Fig. 11 can be weighted Small) is not the single linguistic term involved in the fuzzy
according to the expert confidence in the expressed description of the error, other actions will be combined with
knowledge the anticipative action. The fuzzy partitioning of Fig. 15 has
been based on the expert knowledge and rapidly adjusted by
If error is N and change in error is control is N
Z then
means of a few trials.
with weight From the definition of the fuzzy meanings of the linguistic
If error is N and change in error is Z then control is O terms, the complementary notion of fuzzy description of a
with weight measurement can be derived. The symbolic fuzzification of
a measurement , is a fuzzy subset of linguistic terms,
A more compact form of these two rules is given by the characterized by its membership function denoted . Thus,
following single composed rule: for any term represents the grade of membership
with which the linguistic term belongs to the fuzzy descrip-
If error is N and change in error is Z then control is tion of the measurement . Any measurement that belongs to
the meaning of a linguistic term can obviously be linguistically
described at least by this term. Furthermore, if a term
Even if it is obvious, let us note that the plus sign used belongs to the description of a measurement at a grade
in the conclusion part of the rules is not the summation of membership , then the measurement belongs
on real numbers but the classical representation of a to the meaning of the linguistic term with the same grade
discrete fuzzy subset. of membership. Finally, the fundamental relation linking the
fuzzy meaning of a term with the symbolic fuzzification of
D. Fuzzy Control Architecture a measurement is given by
Fuzzy control methods relying on symbolic representation (4)
[9] are well suited to deal with weighted rules. In our case, the
choice of a symbolic fuzzy controller leads to the architecture It stems from this equation that the determination of the
presented in Fig. 14 which is detailed in the next paragraph. partition of the universe of discourse, that is the definition of
1) Symbolic Fuzzification: A symbolic fuzzifier is able to the fuzzy meaning of all linguistic terms, is sufficient to deduce
provide the fuzzy description of any measurement in terms the fuzzy description of any measurement. For example, from
of linguistic terms by delivering a fuzzy subset of terms, the partition defined in Fig. 15, by applying (4), we obtain
called descriptor set by Zadeh [22]. In order to apply such a the symbolic fuzzification of the measured error , as
fuzzification, a link has to be established between the numeric illustrated in Fig. 16:
and linguistic worlds.
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DUSSUD et al.: FUZZY LOGIC CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD 253
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254 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 6, NO. 2, MARCH 1998
C. Experimental Results
The control strategy described above was successfully im-
plemented in January 1996 on a French slab caster. A data-
logger allows an accurate analysis of the control performance.
Fig. 22 shows the behavior of the new control strategy based
on the fuzzy logic theory during a real nozzle unclogging.
It can be noted that the performance obtained is similar to
the expected one. Furthermore, the switching between the two
controllers does not induce any bump in the actuator control.
By comparing the simulation and experimental results, it can
be stated that the simple modelization assumptions were not
too detrimental. In other words, the simulation tool seems to
be able to correctly represent the real process as shown in
Fig. 20. Rule weight adjustment.
Fig. 23.
Despite that some disturbances such as tundish weight varia-
allows the analysis of the influence of the weights introduced tions, metal viscosity, and dynamic behavior of the unclogging,
in the rulebase. When the change in error is 40, only the were not taken into account in the design phase, the fuzzy
rules with the premise Change in error is N are fired. The control solution has shown very good performances.
control law 1 corresponds to the rulebase of Fig. 17 where
the weight of the rule If error is PS and change in error is
N then control is O is equal to one. In the same way, the V. CONCLUSION
control law 2 corresponds to the same rulebase where the rule Level control problems fall into two main categories. In the
If error is P and change in error is N then control is N has first one, the metal level has to be as constant as possible
a weight equal to one. According to the expert opinion, the in the steady-state response in order to improve the metal
anticipative effect is too important in the first case, while it is quality. It usually consists in reducing mold level oscillations.
too small in the second one. In order to adjust the anticipative Classical signal processing and advanced automatic control are
action, a weight of 0.6 was chosen for the former case and a suitable for this kind of problems. In particular, recent studies
weight of 0.3 was chosen in the latter, leading to the control dealing with predictive model-based control can allow to take
law 3 in Fig. 20. into account the process nonlinearities in the gain adjustment.
However, when the process is highly nonlinear, time varying,
B. Simulation Results or depends on a lot of parameters, the cost for getting an
The simulation was made with the SIMULINK software accurate model is often estimated as being too high. In this
in the PC Windows 3.11 environment. In this simulation, case, fuzzy control techniques can be viewed as an alternative
the parameters were and s for the PI when expert knowledge is available.
controller and mm and s for the unclogging The second kind of problems is the control of transient
parameters (see Fig. 6). phenomena which correspond to working point changes. Tran-
Simulation makes it possible to observe the interest of sient phenomena which are currently encountered are, for
switching to the fuzzy controller as soon as unclogging is example: casting starts, casting stops, casting speed changes,
detected. As it is shown in Fig. 21, the results of fuzzy control nozzle uncloggings, automatic variation of mold width, and
are beneficial. The level overshoot is reduced by approximately the flying tundish technique which consists in changing
40% and the transient time is divided by approximately three. the tundish during the casting without any production stop.
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DUSSUD et al.: FUZZY LOGIC CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS CASTING MOLD 255
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