Internal Model Control based Preheating Zone Temperature Control for Varying Time Delay Uncertainty of the Reheating Furnace

This paper proposes an Internal Model Control (IMC) and IMC based PID, for zone temperature control of a steel slab reheating furnace. A second order plus time-delay model of the pre-heating zone of the process is used. This process experiences time-delays that alter with the operating conditions. An Internal Model Control is designed which is robust to changes in such time-delay and is simulated in MATLAB. The analysis on the simulated results show that robustness features of IMC and IMC based PID, overdo the performance of other controllers.