Design of optimal temperature patterns in the reheating furnace with regenerative burner for energy saving

A reheating furnace is a facility of a rod mill plant where a billet is heated to have uniform target temperature so that it can be milled to produce wire. Since the reheating furnace consumes very large amount of energy to heat up the billets, it is very important to find an optimal temperature setting in the furnace for energy saving. This paper proposes an optimal temperature setting method based on FEM (Finite Element Method) and uDEAS (Univariate Dynamic Encoding Algorithm for Search). The energy consumption by the proposed scheme is reduced meaningfully.