Detection of incipient clogging in pulverized coal injection lines

This paper deals with the detection of clogging in the coal injection lines of a blast furnace. A physical model is developed and augmented with a signal that represents clogging. A nonlinear observer is proposed and shown to have any predefined convergence rate. An adaptive detection threshold scheme which is robust against time-varying uncertainties is employed. Simulations and experiments with real data are carried out to illustrate the usefulness of the methods.