Research on temperature prediction model of molten steel of tundish in continuous casting

To achieve the desired superheat of molten steel during the continuous casting process, optimization of process parameters such as molten steel temperature in ladle furnace, casting speed, and baking temperature is necessary. Therefore, obtaining the superheat corresponding to these process parameters in advance is particularly important. To address this issue, a model for predicting the temperature of molten steel in the tundish during continuous casting is designed. The model adopts a combined modeling approach of mechanistic model and data model. To address the issue of the mechanism model's inability to capture the variation of the lining's thermal parameters, this article improves the traditional physics-informed neural network (PINN) algorithm. It combines the constraints from both the forward and inverse problems, allowing for obtaining solutions to the equations while capturing the variation of equation parameters. Actual data from multiple casting sequences at a steel plant are collected to validate the accuracy and interpretability of the model. The results show that the error of the model is about 2.1k which has better accuracy compared to pure mechanistic model and pure data model. Additionally, it can capture the variation patterns of tundish lining thermal parameters under different operating conditions. Therefore, the model designed in this article can provide both profound physical interpretation ability and more practical predictions of molten steel temperature.