Abstract
The plate manufacturing processes are composed of the reheating furnace, finishing mill, cooling process and hot leveling. The finishing rolling mill (FM) as a reversing mill has produced the plate steel through multiple pass rolling. The automatic gauge control (AGC) is employed to maintain the thickness tolerance. The high grade products are forming greater parts of the manufacturing and customers are requiring strict thickness margin. For this reason, the advanced AGC method is required instead of the conventional AGC based on the PI control. To overcome the slow response performance of the conventional AGC and the thickness measurement delay, a fuzzy AGC based on the thickness deviation and its trend is proposed in this paper. An embedded controller with the fuzzy AGC has been developed and implemented at the plate mill in POSCO. The fuzzy AGC has dynamically controlled the roll gap in real time with the programmable logic controller (PLC). On line tests have been performed for the general and TMCP products. As the results, the thickness deviation range (maximum - minimum of the inner plate) is averagely from 0.3 to 0.1 mm over the full length. The fuzzy AGC has improved thickness deviation and completely satisfied customer needs.
