Ceramics-Silikáty 50 (1) 51-55 (2006)

Overview of automatic control of glass furnaces

P. Havel

This survey presents the current state of art in the field of modeling, identification and control of processes in glass industry from the automatic control perspective. First, a brief characteristic and some specific issues concerning modeling and control task in glass manufacturing are given. Then approaches to finding a suitable model for purposes of controller design and its verification by means of computer simulation are described. Among these belong frequently used empirical modeling techniques (linear black-box models), fuzzy rules based models and reduced models built from first principles. This is followed by a survey of control strategies including manual and PID control, fuzzy control and model-based predictive control (MPC) together with some used or suggested control hierarchies and architectures. Advantages and drawbacks of each method are discussed. The paper is concluded by current challenges in automatic control of glass manufacturing processes.

Keywords: Glass furnace, Automatic control, Modeling, Simulation.