Title: Optimisation of burning loss in reheating furnace of hot rolling mill using Taguchi technique

Authors: G.S. Dangayach; Priyanka Gupta

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, J.L.N. Road, Jaipur-302017, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, J.L.N. Road, Jaipur-302017, India

Abstract: Most of the steel rolling mills are facing a great problem of large volume of burning losses in reheating furnace. The losses are nearly 3.5% to 4%. Literature review indicates that there is no specific methodology available to control the burning loss to its lowest possible valve. We have conducted a series of experiments in a steel rolling mill using Taguchi methodology (L₉ orthogonal array) and analysed it using Minitab software. In this experimentation, temperature, soaking zone time and surface area of the raw material was considered as a process parameter with three levels and burning loss as a response variable. ANOVA is performed to provide information about the significance of the process parameters to affect the response variable. The confirmation experiment was conducted using the optimum values of the process parameters. The confirmation experiment results in the burning loss value of 1.1837% which is very near to the experimental value. This indicates the robustness of the design of our experiment.

Keywords: reheating furnaces; burning loss; Taguchi methods; orthogonal arrays; Minitab; optimisation; hot rolling mills; steel rolling mills; temperature; soaking zone time; material surface area; design of experiments; DOE; ANOVA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2016.077991

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2016 Vol.10 No.2, pp.152 - 161

Received: 19 Jul 2014
Accepted: 21 Sep 2014
Published online: 31 Jul 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article