Performance Assessment of a Radiant Tube

Furnace’s Control System

1st Javier Jimenez 2nd Fabian Manrique
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación y Electrónica Departamento de Innovación
Universidad de la Costa Indutronica del Caribe S.A.S.
Barranquilla, Colombia Barranquilla, Colombia
jajimenez8@hotmail.com fajose97@gmail.com

Abstract—The following paper describes the proceedings fol-

lowed during the analysis and evaluation of radiant tube fur-
nace’s temperature control system, which belongs to a industrial
plant from Barranquilla, Colombia. This assessment was per-
formed using an application named SELC, because of its name in
Spanish, which integrates different non-invasive techniques from
the control performance monitoring (CPM) field of research. Fig. 1. Radiant Tube Furnace and its zones.
The methodology used in the analysis is described as well as
the applications and tools used. Finally, possible economical,
productivity and quality benefits that could be obtained due to
the optimization of the control system behavior are presented. II. M ATERIALS AND M ETHODS
Index Terms—Control Performance Monitoring, Industrial
Plant, Radiant Tube Furnace In this sections, the furnace’s inner workings are described,
as well as the tools used and methodologies followed.

I. I NTRODUCTION A. Radiant Tube Furnace

Control systems are the most important element in any
automated industrial plant. Aspects such as product quality,
process security and energy and raw material consumption
depend directly or indirectly on the good performance of these
systems. To face this issue, different techniques and methods
have been developed for assessing and diagnosing control
loops, which has led to the growth of the field of research
known as Control Loop Monitoring (CPM) [1]. CPM tech-
niques has been applied in systems around the world with good
results in economical and productivity performance [2]–[5].
Following this trend, Indutronica del Caribe S.A.S. has been
developing an application, named SELC [6], that integrates
the main techniques found in the literature of this field of
knowledge. With the objective of testing this application in
actual operational condition, a collaboration with a local steel
industrial plant was formed.
It was provided access to the data acquired by the tempera-
ture control system of a radiant tube furnace for a preliminary
analysis. In this paper, we present the different proceedings
followed during this evaluation and the conclusions reached.
The analyzed furnace and software used are described in II-A
and II-B. The methodology used is mentioned in II-C. In III,
Some possibilities for improvement and recommendations are
identified and explained, along the results obtained. Further
work is necessary, in order to address the different issues
detected during the scope of this work.
As a first step for the analysis, the plant was visited for
explanation about the inner workings of the control system.
The radiant tube furnace is used in daily operation for steel
treatment. Steel enters the furnace previously preheated in
the production line. The furnace is divided in three zones,
as shown in Fig. 1, each zone with its own control loop. The
temperature of each zone is adjusted by manipulating a control
valve which regulates the fuel gas flow.
The system has a protection mechanism that turns off the
burners in a zone when the respective controller output falls to
a determined value. The controller will continue responding to
changes in temperature, but will be unable to control it. The
burners will be turned on automatically after the controller
output surpasses another threshold. The values for thresholds
of each zone are presented in Table I. The consequences
that this control logic has over the system’s behavior will be
explained in the following sections.
TABLE I
O N AND O FF THRESHOLD FOR EACH ZONE .
Zone Off Threshold (%CO) On Threshold (%CO)
RTF1 13 15
RTF2 18 20
RTF3 18 20
INDUTRONICA DEL CARIBE S.A.S.
B. Software Used
a) SELC: The Software for Control Loop Assessment
or SELC, due to its initials in Spanish, is an application
designed by Indutronica del Caribe for the evaluation of
control systems [6]. It integrates different CPM techniques
found in the literature [1], with emphasis on performance
evaluation based on minimum variance [7] [8], settling time
[9], [10] and valve diagnosis [11] [12]. Fig. 2. Simulink model for process characterization.
b) MATLAB: MATLAB® is a mathematical computing
software with emphasis on matrix manipulation. It uses its
own programming language and offers a variety of functions The obtained transfer functions fitted for each zone can be
and toolboxes that allows data processing and plotting; and seen in Table II. In zone 3, however, it was not possible to
creation of user interfaces. extract a sample with the characteristics required, due to the
c) Simulink: Simulink® is a graphic programming envi- existence of oscillations throughout the process. The nature
ronment. It is mainly used for system simulation. of these oscillations is related to the protection mechanism
mentioned in II-A and it will be explained in detail in III.
C. Methodology
Data from the furnace control system was sampled at 1 TABLE II
second intervals over 2 weeks period. For each zone, the F ITTED TRANSFER FUNCTIONS FOR EACH ZONE .
following variables were taken into account:
Zone Transfer Function Dead Time (s)
• Time, in which each data point was taken. Zone 1 1.215
e−20s 20
s2 +25.12s+0.01452
• Process variable (PV) or temperature, in °C.
0.001761
• Controller Output (OP), in %CO. Zone 2 s2 +1.724s+0.001071
e−19.1s 19.1
• Set-Point (SP), in °C.
• Parameters for the PID controller.
• Logical variable for the manual system. If the system is Next, the system’s closed control loop was modeled in
in manual mode, this value is 1. Simulink, as shown in Fig. 3. Using this model, a PID
• Logical variable for the burners. If the burners are on, controller was tuned for the previously drawn samples and
this value is 1. the fitted process transfer function.
The shared data was imported into MATLAB workspace for
its inspection and processing. Null values were replaced using
a 1 minute wide moving window average. For more reliable
results in the assessment tests, knowledge about the system’s
dynamic response is needed, specifically, the dead time. Since
this information was not known, performance test based on
minimum variance was done as a first step, over a range of
10—100 seconds with the results averaged. SELC was used
for this evaluation. Since changes in Set-Point are common Fig. 3. Simulink model for closed control loop simulation.
during the furnace operation, the evaluation was made on the
error, calculated as shown in 1, as recommended in [1]. The tuning parameters were obtained for a parallel PID
controller, shown in (3), and the results for each zone can
Error = SP − P V (1) be seen in Table III. In Zone 3, this was not possible for the
For a more detailed analysis, a way for characterizing the reasons mentioned previously.
process with the available data was designed. A continuous 1 N
sample of data was drawn for each zone, according to the fol- Gc = P + I +D (3)
s 1 + N 1s
lowing requirements:The system must have been on automatic
mode during the whole sample duration, the burners must be
on and there must have been changes in the Set-Point. With TABLE III
this sample data, a Second Order Plus Dead Time (SOPDT) T UNED CONTROL PARAMETERS
transfer function, seen in (2), was fitted to the data using Zone P I D N
Simulink and MATLAB Optimization Toolbox. The model Zone 1 0.07 9.85x10−5 7.15 0.0057
used can be seen in Fig 2. Zone 2 20.56 0.08 58.17 0.03

Kp ωn2 After this, both simulated and real system were tested
Gp = e−t0 s (2)
s2 + 2ωn ζs + ωn2 using performance assessment based on minimum variance
and settling time. This was done to draw conclusions about
the actual operation, comparing it with a better tuned system
to determine possibilities for improvement.
Finally, a new data sample was solicited with additional
information about the fuel gas consumed during the process
since in the original data this information was not recorded.
Using machine learning, a neural network model was fitted to
the fuel gas consumption in relation to the rest of variables.
With this model, a predicted fuel gas consumption rate was
obtained for both the original data and the simulated controller.
This way, conclusions can be made over how the gas con-
sumption rate can be improved with a well tuned controller,
as improvements in a furnace’s control system have shown to
cause a reduction in the energy requirements [3].
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSIONS
Graphs for each zone’s considered variables in the analysis
can be seen in Fig. 4, 5, 6. From the visual inspection, the
existence of oscillations can be noticed in every zone of the
furnace. This is specially notorious in zone 3, where system
is oscillating during more than 70% of the time.
Fig. 4. Radiant Tube Furnace: zone 1.
Fig. 5. Radiant Tube Furnace: zone 2.
As mentioned previously, the caused for these oscillations
can be traced to the system’s protection mechanism: When
the controller output of a zone falls below the off threshold,
the flow of gas to this zone is closed but the controller
is still active. This causes the temperature to drop and the
controller to react by increasing its output, until it reaches
the on threshold and gains control of the system again. But,
if the Set-Point value is such that the stationary for the
controller output is below the off threshold, the control will
drop its output again, repeating the cycle. These oscillations
Fig. 6. Radiant Tube Furnace: zone 3.
can be detrimental to the steel hardness, since it can cause
residual stress and undesired changes in the metal micro-
structure due to the temperature non-uniformity [13]. In [14],
it is suggested that steel temperature variability should be
controlled within about ±2.5°C for temperatures below 675°
C and ±8°C for higher temperatures. Due to oscillations,
temperature variability can reach values around ±9°C in zone
1 and ±11°C in zone 3. Zone 2 is the least affected with
a variability around ±5°C, as seen in Fig. refoscillations.
Besides the problems with steel quality, the oscillations can
also cause an acceleration in equipment wear and control
instability [1]. To affront this issue, changes in the control
logic and control tuning parameters are recommended.
Fig. 7. Sample of oscillations found on each zone. From top to bottom: Zone
1, Zone 2, Zone 3
Continuing the analysis, a summary of the performance test
carried out on each zone can be seen in Table IV. Results
show that control performance is the component that most
influences the process variance, seen with a consistently high
TUNI value. As expected, zone 3 performed the worst, with a
TUNI value close to 1. As NOSI value was zero in every zone,
results showed low impact of noise in the total variance. DELI
indice, although low across the test, showed a considerable
variability, with a trend for growing the higher the dead time
value used in the test. Because of this, more information about
the process’s dead time is needed to draw conclusions about its
influence in the performance. In general, results proved once
again the need for re-tuning and further analysis [8].
Next, performance evaluation based both on settling time
and minimum variance was done over the sample drawn
 TABLE IV TABLE VI
NOSI, DELI AND TUNI INDICES FOR EACH ZONE . A DEAD TIME RANGE D ETERMINISTIC TEST BASED ON SETTLING TIME FOR SAMPLE AND
OF 10-100 SECONDS WAS USED . SIMULATED DATA

NOSI DELI TUNI Zone 1 Real

Zone Indice
MEAN STD MEAN STD MEAN STD Real Simulated Real Simulated
Zone 1 0.00 0.00 0.07 0.04 0.93 0.04 ∗ (s)
Tset 206.6 25 22.68 14.33
Zone 2 0.00 0.00 0.08 0.04 0.92 0.04 IAED 22.47 4.46 9.18 5.7
Zone 3 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.01 0.98 0.01 Overshoot 0.41 0.21 0.58 0.01

During the analysis, there were signs of fluctuations with

mentioned in II-C and the tuned controller simulation. Graphs
with both the sample data and the simulated data can be seen
in Fig. 8. Results from the different evaluations is presented
in Table V and VI. The dead time used in the assessment is
the dead time defined in the characterization.
Results show a noticeable improvement in performance in
zone 1. In zone 2, despite an improvement, it was not as
remarkable as that shown in the previous area, but a reduction
in overshoot and settling time was obtained. Re-tuning the con-
troller can, then, reduce the necessary time for the temperature
to settle in the new Set-Point. This will allow faster process
reactivation after a change in Set-Point, leading to increase in
productivity and efficiency. The variability respect to Set-Point
can also be potentially decreased with a new tuning, which
translates to better steel quality with consistent mechanical
properties like hardness [1].
a different nature to those previously described. The cause
of these new oscillations is believed to be an undiscovered
disturbance in the system. The existence of problems with the
sensors should also be considered [15]. Further analysis is
necessary to find the cause of these fluctuations.
Finally, additional data about fuel use was asked for this
analysis. A neural network model was fitted which predicts
the total gas flow that reaches the furnace. Zone 1 and zone
2’s original data was simulated using the transfer functions
and controller modeled previously. Using this new data, an
analysis was done to draw conclusions about potential benefits
in energy consumption reduction by re-tuning the system. In
Fig. 9, a graph figuring the predicted consumption for both
the original and simulated data.

Fig. 9. Graphs for predicted fuel consumption using both the original (Blue)
and the simulated data (Red).

Total predicted consumption during the evaluated period

was 52214m3 for simulated data and 54990m3 for the original
data. This means there is potential for a 5% reduction in fuel
consumption. Assuming a price of 6 USD per thousand cubic
feet, this reduction could save more than $15.000 per year in
furnace operating costs, as seen in (4).
Fig. 8. Graphs for sample data and simulated data for each zone. Signs of
oscillations in zone 1. Top: Zone 1, Bottom: Zone 2. 365days 54990m3 1kf t3 $6 $15193
5%x x x x = (4)
year 14days 28.31m3 kf t3 year
TABLE V IV. C ONCLUSIONS
M INIMUM VARIANCE ASSESSMENT FOR SAMPLE AND SIMULATED DATA
This work presents the results of evaluations carried out
Zone
Real Simulated on the control system of the Radiant Tube Furnace belonging
NOSI DELI TUNI NOSI DELI TUNI to a plant in steel industry. Results showed the existence of
Zone 1 0.00 0.14 0.86 0.01 0.45 0.54
Zone 2 0.00 0.24 0.75 0.00 0.3 0.69 oscillations caused by the loop control logic in each zone.
Zone 3 suffered the worst from these oscillations, presenting
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International, 2006.
that most influenced the variability of the process. A com- [15] MAA Shoukat Choudhury. Plantwide oscillations diagnosis—current
parison with a simulated controller, tuned for this process, state and future directions. Asia-Pacific Journal of Chemical Engineer-
presented possibilities for improvement in settling time and ing, 6(3):484–496, 2011.
temperature variability by re-tuning the controller, which could
be translated into an increase in productivity. Signs of an unde-
tected disturbance were found, so further analysis is required
for its identification and solution. Finally, possible economic
benefits were analyzed, by predicting fuel gas consumption
rate using a neural network model. Results demonstrated the
potential for savings of over $15.000 in operational costs of
the radiant tube. The application of CPM in the Colombian
industry opens a door for increasing the productivity and
economic performance of automated processes. We hope this
can be translated in more innovation projects about this field
of research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

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