Improving Blast Furnace Raceway Blockage Detection. Part 2: Signal Processing of Hot Blast Pressure Data

The present paper is part 2 of a three paper series discussing raceway blockages and various approaches for automated detection based on blast furnace (BF) plant data. Blockages of the raceway areas occur on a regular basis and in cases where the hot blast flow rate is reduced significantly, it is beneficial to shut down additional fuel systems like pulverized coal injection (PCI) on that specific tuyere. While part 1 gave an overview on the different appearances of raceway blockages and presented a common test-bench used for signal and image processing, part 2 focuses on the discussion of various signal processing algorithms and their applicability for raceway blockage detection. The algorithms are tested on data from a real BF with supplementary tuyere camera images to validate the results. Beyond this test dataset, a long-term test is performed by processing three month of BF data offline.