On the System Identification of a Ferrosilicium Submerged Arc Furnace

A 36 MW ferrosilicium (FeSi) submerged are furnace owned by Icelandic Alloys Ltd. is studied for the purposes of system identification. In particular, the part of the system associated with the control of the electrode current is examined. This part is of interest for evaluation and improvement of the existing controller which occasionally shows irregular behavior. Data was collected at Icelandic Alloys, where experiments were conducted both open- and closed-loop. Different ARX (autoregressive with auxiliary input) models were tried using various model orders, combinations of inputs and input delays. The model selected was then tried on different sets of data. The modelling was supported via Matlab[l], which was applied for the model identification, various validation procedures and simulations of the models obtained.