Research And Development Of An Expert System For Heating Furnace

The operation optimization of heating furnaces has attracted more and more attention because of their high energy consumption in the field of oil refining. Compared to developed countries, the automatic control system for heating furnaces in China is rather behindhand, because the operation optimization of a heating furnace has not been considered carefully yet. Therefore, a lot of oil refining enterprises plan to develop Advanced Process Control (APC) system. As a part of APC, an expert system can distinguish abnormal performance and optimize the operation conditions of the heating furnace by supervision and calculation of the operational data. Moreover, it can provide guidance or advice for the operators of the heating furnace. In addition, the expert system can make the heating furnace work safely and efficiently. The main research contents of this thesis are as follow:1. The operation performances of heating furnaces have been investigated. According to the requirements of the oil refining company, the function of expert system has been divided into three parts: optimization, supervision, simulation.2. Visual Basic has been used as the developing tool for the expert system. The interface as well as frame of the expert system has been developed by Visual Basic.3. The operational data of a heating furnace has been gotten from the PI database of an oil refining company by using DDE under Windows OS. The malfunction database for a heating furnace has been built to realize the function of supervision.4. A mathematical model of heating furnace has been built. The optimum gas consumption has been calculated by using the numerical heat transfer method and...