Digital Twin of a Reheating Furnace

• Main Author: Halme Ståhlberg, Daniel
• Format: Bachelor Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för system- och rymdteknik 2021
• Subjects: Machine Learning; Digital Twin; Reheating Furnace; Steel Industry; Tensorflow; Neural Network; Prediction; Computer Engineering; Datorteknik; Luleå
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-87911

In this thesis, a proof of concept of a digital twin of a type of reheating furnace, the walking beam furnace, is presented. It is created by using a machine learning concept called a neural network. The digital twin is trained using real data from a walking beam furnace located in Swerim AB, Luleå, and is taught to predict the temperature in the furnace using air, fuel and pressure as inputs. The machine learning technique used is an artifical neural network in the form of a multilayer perceptron model. The resulting model consists of 3 layers, input, hidden and output layer. The hyperparameters is decided by using grid search cross validation. The hyperparameters chosen to use in this thesis was amount of epochs, optimizer, learning rate, batch size, activation function, regularizer and amount of neurons in the hidden layer. The final settings for these can be found in table. The digital twin is then evaluated comparing predicted temperatures and actual temperatures from the measured data. The end result shows that the twin performs reasonably well. The predictions differs from measured temperature with a percentage around 0.5% to 1.5%.