This article discusses a heat treatment furnace that operates continuously under temperature feedback control. Due to the limitations of the sensors, the temperature of the parts is controlled indirectly. Control of the temperature distribution in the furnace is a circuit that is actually an open loop in relation to the control of the temperature of the parts. The furnace is divided into four temperature control zones, and the mass flow of fuel, like natural gas, to all burners in a zone is controlled simultaneously to control the temperature of that particular zone. Radiation radiation at a great distance from zone to zone affects the temperature of other zones when fuel is consumed in a particular zone. The furnace operates at temperatures above 1000 K, and the residence time of the parts in the furnace is on the order of several hours. The creation process consists in heating pre-prepared parts from different materials to a certain temperature in a continuously operating austenitizing furnace, followed by rapid cooling and quenching in water, brine or oil to obtain the desired metallurgical properties, such as hardness, toughness, shear strength, tensile strength, etc. In the article, we describe the operation system of the austenitization heating furnace and develop a semi-empirical model of the furnace. A model is developed in a two-scale modeling approach to solve the problem of minimizing the energy consumption of a furnace.
Keywords: furnace, energy consumption of the furnace, heat treatment, Temperature profile of the recuperator, energy consumption of the system.
