A real-time thermal model for the intelligent control of cooling systems for hot strip mill work rolls

This article describes a mathematical model which calculates, in real time, the temperature and the thermal expansion of the work rolls of hot strip mills. These results are used to feed a real-time expert system, which controls the cooling system of the work rolls. These two magnitudes can not be measured online which, over the last few decades, has motivated several authors to develop different models to obtain the thermal evolution of the work rolls of hot strip mills. However, while their motivation was to achieve the greatest possible accuracy working off-line, the motivation of this work is very different: to achieve a mathematical model that, while maintaining acceptable accuracy, is capable of providing results in real-time and with the minimum consumption of computational resources.