A shape control system based on a wavelet radial basis function network for a Sendzimir mill (ZRM) and fuzzy control are developed to improve the shape control performance of a conventional ZRM system. The conventional shape recognition system for a ZRM adopted an incomplete multi-layer perceptron neural network system that was constructed two decades ago. The poor shape recognition of this system leads to actuator saturation and shape control performance deterioration. Therefore, the full automatic operation of a ZRM is often stopped, and manual input need to be performed. This affects the quality, causes a decline in the productivity of the steel strip and an unnecessary waste of manpower. In this paper, a wavelet radial basis network is developed to replace the multi-layer perceptron network and consequently improve shape recognition performance. A modified fuzzy controller is also constructed to prevent actuator saturation that occurs in a conventional shape control system owing to the use of a fixed gain-based fuzzy controller. A comparative simulation based on the data measured from an actual ZRM plant demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed shape control system.
