Analysis of Billet Thermal Behavior and Temperature Setting Optimization in a Walking Beam Reheat Furnace

Abstract

Aiming at the heating process of copper alloy billets, thermal behavior in a walking beam reheat furnace is investigated. A simplified thermal model is presented to predict billet temperature distribution considering specific heat transfer characteristics. Hot gas blackness is corrected basing on composition of chamber combustion atmosphere during the computation of heat flux boundary condition which improves the model accuracy. A fully implicit scheme is employed to solve the discretization of conduction equation in finite volume method. As an inverse application, a practical method to optimize the chamber gas setting temperature is introduced to make a billet temperature track the technical curve well. Design effects are calculated and simulated with Matlab software. Application results for the hot rolled coil production illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.