Saving gas and saving money-integrating an expert system into the process monitoring of steel making

As a by-product of an oxygen steel-making process, large amount of carbon monoxide gas are produced. This gas, which is a valuable fuel, was not being collected during every steel-making blow due to engineering faults. The main reasons were associated with the operation of the programmable logic controller (PLC) controlling gas collection on each vessel. The PLC, which is programmed to abort gas collection whenever problems arise in the gas recovery system, was giving no warning to the process engineers that it intended to abort gas collection, nor a reason for dong so. The building of an expert system to interpret the output of the PLC and waste gas analysis system and report error conditions that had either prevented or aborted gas recovery during the current blow, or would prevent gas recovery in a future one, is described.<
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