Monitoring sintering burn-through point using infrared thermography

Sintering is a complex industrial process that applies heat to fine particles of iron ore and other materials to produce sinter, a solidified porous material used in blast furnaces. The sintering process needs to be carefully adjusted, so that the combustion zone reaches the bottom of the material j...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2013-08, Vol.13 (8), p.10287-10305
Main Authors: Usamentiaga, Rubén, Molleda, Julio, Garcia, Daniel F, Bulnes, Francisco G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
active contour segmentation
Equipment Design
Equipment Failure Analysis
feature extraction
Heat
Heating - instrumentation
Heating - methods
Infrared Rays
infrared thermography
Iron compounds
Materials Testing - instrumentation
Materials Testing - methods
Porous materials
Process controls
Sensors
Sintering
sintering burn-through point
Steel production
Temperature
Thermography - instrumentation
Thermography - methods
Transducers
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Summary:Sintering is a complex industrial process that applies heat to fine particles of iron ore and other materials to produce sinter, a solidified porous material used in blast furnaces. The sintering process needs to be carefully adjusted, so that the combustion zone reaches the bottom of the material just before the discharge end. This is known as the burn-through point. Many different parameters need to be finely tuned, including the speed and the quantities of the materials mixed. However, in order to achieve good results, sintering control requires precise feedback to adjust these parameters. This work presents a sensor to monitor the sintering burn-through point based on infrared thermography. The proposed procedure is based on the acquisition of infrared images at the end of the sintering process. At this position, infrared images contain the cross-section temperatures of the mixture. The objective of this work is to process this information to extract relevant features about the sintering process. The proposed procedure is based on four steps: key frame detection, region of interest detection, segmentation and feature extraction. The results indicate that the proposed procedure is very robust and reliable, providing features that can be used effectively to control the sintering process.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s130810287