An explicit equation leading to a method for improving furnace efficiency is presented. This equation is dimensionless and can be applied to furnaces of any size and fuel type for the purposes of comparison. The implications for current furnace design are discussed. Currently the technique most commonly used to reduce energy consumption in galvanizing furnaces is to increase burner turndown. Th...

The two most widely used neural models, multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function network (RBFN), are presented in the framework of system identification and control. The main steps for building such nonlinear black box models are regressor choice, selection of internal architecture, and parameter estimation. The advantages of neural network models are summarized: universal approxim...