Model-Based Control of Electroslag Remelting Process Using Unscented Kalman Filter

Author(s):  
Seokyoung Ahn ◽  
Joseph J. Beaman ◽  
Rodney L. Williamson ◽  
David K. Melgaard

Electroslag Remelting (ESR) is used widely throughout the specialty metals industry. The process generally consists of a regularly shaped electrode that is immersed a small amount in liquid slag at a temperature higher than the melting temperature of the electrode. Melting droplets from the electrode fall through the lower density slag into a liquid pool constrained by a crucible and solidify into an ingot. High quality ingots require that electrode melt rate and immersion depth be controlled. This can be difficult when process conditions are such that the temperature distribution in the electrode is not at steady state. A new method of ESR control has been developed that incorporates an accurate, reduced-order melting model to continually estimate the temperature distribution in the electrode. The ESR process is highly nonlinear, noisy, and has coupled dynamics. An extended Kalman filter and an unscented Kalman filter were chosen as possible estimators and compared in the controller design. During the highly transient periods in melting, the unscented Kalman filter showed superior performance for estimating and controlling the system.

Author(s):  
Seokyoung Ahn ◽  
Joseph J. Beaman ◽  
Rodney L. Williamson ◽  
David K. Melgaard

Electroslag remelting (ESR) is used widely throughout the specialty metals industry. The process generally consists of a regularly shaped electrode, wherein a small amount is immersed in liquid slag at a temperature higher than the melting temperature of the electrode. Melting droplets from the electrode fall through the lower density slag into a liquid pool constrained by a crucible and solidify into an ingot. High quality ingots require that electrode melt rate and immersion depth be controlled at all times during the process. This can be difficult when process conditions are such that the temperature distribution in the electrode is not at steady state. This condition is encountered during the beginning and closing stages of the ESR process and also during some process disturbances such as when the melt zone passes through a transverse electrode crack. To address these transient melting situations, a new method of the ESR estimation and control has been developed that incorporates an accurate, reduced order melting model to continually estimate the temperature distribution in the electrode. The ESR process is highly nonlinear, noisy, and has coupled dynamics. An extended Kalman filter and an unscented Kalman filter were chosen as possible estimators and compared in the controller design. During the highly transient periods in melting, the unscented Kalman filter showed superior performance for estimating and controlling the system.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (06) ◽  
pp. 1550016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Askari ◽  
Jianchun Li ◽  
Bijan Samali

System identification refers to the process of building or improving mathematical models of dynamical systems from the observed experimental input–output data. In the area of civil engineering, the estimation of the integrity of a structure under dynamic loadings and during service condition has become a challenge for the engineering community. Therefore, there has been a great deal of attention paid to online and real-time structural identification, especially when input–output measurement data are contaminated by high-level noise. Among real-time identification methods, one of the most successful and widely used algorithms for estimation of system states and parameters is the Kalman filter and its various nonlinear extensions such as extended Kalman filter (EKF), Iterated EKF (IEKF), the recently developed unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and Iterated UKF (IUKF). In this paper, an investigation has been carried out on the aforementioned techniques for their effectiveness and efficiencies through a highly nonlinear single degree of freedom (SDOF) structure as well as a two-storey linear structure. Although IEKF is an improved version of EKF, results show that IUKF generally produces better results in terms of structural parameters and state estimation than UKF and IEKF. Also IUKF is more robust to noise levels compared to the other approaches.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kavitha Lakshmi M. ◽  
Koteswara Rao S. ◽  
Subrahmanyam Kodukula

In underwater surveillance, three-dimensional target tracking is a challenging task. The angles-only measurements (i.e., bearing and elevation) obtained by hull mounted sensors are considered to appraise the target motion parameter. Due to noise in measurements and nonlinearity of the system, it is very hard to find out the target location. For many applications, UKF is best estimator that remaining algorithms. Recently, cubature Kalman filter (CKF) is also popular. It is proposed to use UKF (unscented Kalman filter) and CKF (cubature Kalman filter) algorithms that minimize the noise in measurements. So far, researchers carried out this work (target tracking) in Gaussian noise environment, whereas in this paper same work is carried out for non-Gaussian noise environment. The performance evaluation of the filters using Monte-Carlo simulation and Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is accomplished and the results are analyzed. Result shows that UKF is well suitable for highly nonlinear systems than CKF.


Complexity ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Abdullah Al-Hussein ◽  
Achintya Haldar

The complexity in the health assessment of civil infrastructures, as it evolves over a long period of time, is briefly discussed. A simple problem can become very complex based on the current needs, sophistication required, and the technological advancements. To meet the current needs of locating defect spots and their severity accurately and efficiently, infrastructures are represented by finite elements. To increase the implementation potential, the stiffness parameters of all the elements are identified and tracked using only few noise-contaminated dynamic responses measured at small part of the infrastructure. To extract the required information, Kalman filter concept is integrated with other numerical schemes. An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) concept is developed for highly nonlinear dynamic systems. It is denoted as 3D UKF-UI-WGI. The basic UKF concept is improved in several ways. Instead of using one long duration time-history in one global iteration, very short duration time-histories and multiple global iterations with weight factors are used to locate the defect spot more accurately and efficiently. The capabilities of the procedure are demonstrated with the help of two informative examples. The proposed procedure is much superior to the extended Kalman filter-based procedures developed by the team earlier.


2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheng Yang ◽  
Wenzhong Shi ◽  
Wu Chen

The Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is a well-known nonlinear state estimation method. It shows superior performance at nonlinear estimation compared to the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). This paper is devoted to an investigation between UKF and EKF with different feedback control modes in vehicle navigation. Theoretical formulation, simulation and field tests have been carried out to compare the performance of UKF and EKF. The simulation and test results demonstrate that the estimated state of a UKF relies on the measurements and is less sensitive to historical model information. The results also indicate that UKF has benefits for prototype model design due to avoidance of calculation of a Jacobian matrix. EKF, however, is more computationally efficient and more stable.


Author(s):  
Mostafa Osman ◽  
Mohamed W Mehrez ◽  
Mohamed A Daoud ◽  
Ahmed Hussein ◽  
Soo Jeon ◽  
...  

In this paper, a generic multi-sensor fusion framework is developed for the localization of intelligent vehicles and mobile robots. The localization framework is based on moving horizon estimation (MHE). Unlike the commonly used probabilistic filtering algorithms – for example, extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) – MHE relies on solving successive least squares optimization problems over the innovation of multiple sensors’ measurements and a specific estimation horizon. In this paper, we present an efficient and generic multi-sensor fusion scheme, based on MHE. The proposed multi-sensor fusion scheme is capable of operating with different sensors’ rates, missing measurements, and outliers. Moreover, the proposed scheme is based on a multi-threading architecture to reduce its computational cost, making it more feasible for practical applications. The MHE fusion method is tested using simulated data as well as real experimental data sequences from an intelligent vehicle and a mobile robot combining measurements from different sensors to get accurate localization results. The performance of MHE is compared against that of UKF, where the MHE estimation results show superior performance.


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