Prediction of the Time-Varying Ledge Profile inside a High-Temperature Metallurgical Reactor with an Unscented Kalman Filter-Based Virtual Sensor

Abstract

A non-intrusive inverse heat transfer procedure for predicting the two-dimensional time-varying profile of the protective phase-change ledge on the inside surface of the walls of a high-temperature metallurgical reactor is presented. The inverse method, used here as a virtual sensor, enables the on-line estimation of the position of the solid-liquid phase front using thermal sensors embedded in the reactor wall. The virtual sensor comprises a state observer coupled to a reduced model of the reactor. Results show that the virtual sensor that yields the best prediction comprises an unscented Kalman filter, a nonlinear state-space model of thereactor, and two heat flux sensors located at the wall/ledge interface.