Temperature control for thermal treatment of aluminum alloy in a large-scale vertical quench furnace

The temperature control of the large-scale vertical quench furnace is very difficult due to its huge volume and complex thermal exchanges. To meet the technical requirement of the quenching process, a temperature control system which integrates temperature calibration and temperature uniformity control is developed for the thermal treatment of aluminum alloy workpieces in the large-scale vertical quench furnace. To obtain the aluminum alloy workpiece temperature, an air heat transfer model is newly established to describe the temperature gradient distribution so that the immeasurable workpiece temperature can be calibrated from the available thermocouple temperature. To satisfy the uniformity control of the furnace temperature, a second order partial differential equation(PDE) is derived to describe the thermal dynamics inside the vertical quench furnace. Based on the PDE, a decoupling matrix is constructed to solve the coupling issue and decouple the heating process into multiple independent heating subsystems. Then, using the expert control rule to find a compromise of temperature rising time and overshoot during the quenching process. The developed temperature control system has been successfully applied to a 31 m large-scale vertical quench furnace, and the industrial running results show the significant improvement of the temperature uniformity, lower overshoot and shortened processing time.