Sensors and Controls for the Steel Industry; A Department of Energy View

Two common ingredients in the Office of Industrial Programs´ portfolio of projects are risk and long-range development time. These types of research topics tend to augent rather than duplicate industrial research frontiers. A strong thrust to our overall research program involves projects on both simulation and control. This situation comes naturally from the value of achieving a successful new control scheme as well as from consideration of the investment to be made to supply a limited technical market. Examples of control engineering sponsored by DOE will be described, such as: automatic surface inspection of hot steel slabs, in-situ analysis of molten steel, direct measurement of the temperature distribution with a hot or solidifying body of steel and hierarchical computer program for energy savings.