Modeling and Control of Industrial Tunnel-type Furnaces for Brick and Tile Production

The dynamic behavior of an industrial tunneltype furnace is of the fundamental importance for the quality of the processed products. The knowledge of the furnace dynamics can make the control of the system easier as well as it can eliminate certain operational problems. The various subsystems existent in a tunnel-type furnace are usually controlled by conventional techniques and independent controllers offering simply an acceptable operation of the whole system. This paper approaches the overall furnace system by considering both mathematical modeling and fuzzy logic based techniques. It proposes a control scheme for model-based coordination of the individual subsystems which are controlled locally by fuzzy controllers combined with conventional ones. The proposed control structure can be easily applied to the process environment and the implementation may be realized directly on a programmable logic controller. Index Terms – Industrial Furnaces, System Modeling, Control, Simulation, Fuzzy logic