Fault Tolerant Control System of the Rotary Hearth Furnace Servicing Machines

In this paper, a solution to control the servicing machines of a rotary hearth furnace is presented. The proposed control strategy is based on the usage of a modified cascade control structure. The proposed control solution is augmented with a fault detection system capable to detect the faults which frequently occur in the operation of the D.C. motors used to drive the servicing machines. It is proved through simulation that, in a certain range of faults magnitude, their effect is rejected by the controllers, aspect which makes the proposed control system a fault tolerant one. Also, due to the usage of neural reference model, the faults magnitude can be quantified and when the safety limits are reached, some decisions for reducing the servicing machines operation are automatically generated.