Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography for Real-Time Control of Electromagnetic Actuators in Metal Casting

Flow control of liquid metals based on the actual flow condition is important in many metallurgical applications. For instance, the liquid steel flow in the mould of a continuous caster strongly influences the product quality. The flow can be modified by an electromagnetic brake (EMBr). However, due to the lack of appropriate flow measurement techniques, the control of those actuators is usually not based on the actual flow condition. This article describes the recent developments of the Contactless Inductive Flow Tomography (CIFT) towards a real-time monitoring system, which can be used as an input to the control loop for an EMBr. CIFT relies on measuring the flow-induced perturbation of an applied magnetic field and the solution of an underlying linear inverse problem. In order to implement the CIFT reconstructions in combination with EMBr, two issues have to be solved: (i) compensation of the effects of the change in EMBr strength on the CIFT measurement system and (ii) a real-time solution of the inverse problem. We present solutions of both problems for a model of a continuous caster with a ruler-type EMBr. The EMBr introduces offsets of the measured magnetic field that are several orders of magnitude larger than the very flow-induced perturbations. The offset stems from the ferromagnetic hysteresis exhibited by the ferrous parts of the EMBr in the proximity of the measurement coils. Compensation of the offset was successfully achieved by implementing a numerical model of hysteresis to predict the offset. Real-time reconstruction was achieved by precalculating the computationally heavy matrix inverses for a predefined set of regularization parameters and choosing the optimal one in every measurement frame. Finally, we show that this approach does not hinder the reconstruction quality.