The Present State and its Future of Sensor Technology in Iron and Steel Industry

Abstract

In the past decade. strip defect sensing technologies In the Japanese steel Industry developed rapidly to meet the quality requirements for steel strip that have grown Increasingly stringent. To Increase the accuracy of In-line surface defect Inspection In continuous annealing and processing. electrolytic tinning and continuous galvanizing lines. several hardware Improvements have been made. such as a shift from the mono-receiver type to the multi-receiver type and the development of the photo-conductive rod receiver to obtain uniform optical Information across the width of strip. In the area of software. significant developments have been made In the signal processing technology to separate and distinguish the specular reflection from the diffuse reflection. Also. characteristics extraction technologies utilizing neural networks are now In practical use. The Internal defects detected by today's on-line leakage flux sensing technology are of the order of several pp‘s. In addition to these Improved and newly developed pattern recognition technologies. more advanced process monitoring technologies using neural networks. such as diagnosing the operating condition Inside the blast furnace and the prediction of breakouts In the continuous casting process. are also In use. This paper discusses the present state of these new sensing technologies and their future outlook.