Measurement of Zone Temperature Profile of a Resistive Heating Furnace Through RVM Model

In this paper, a system for measuring the zone temperature profile of a horizontal tube furnace is proposed. This system consists of an ultrasonic transducer, quartz tube, resistive horizontal tube furnace, Arduino micro-controller and relevance vector machine (RVM)-based regression model. The ultrasonic transducer is placed in such a way that the acoustic wave is transmitted and then reflected back from the resistive horizontal tube furnace. The variations in the temperature values inside the tube furnace may affect the receiving voltage of the ultrasonic transducer. The RVM model is employed to predict the temperature using the inputs as the ultrasonic transducer voltage and the distance of the propagating path of the ultrasonic wave. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system is effective to measure the temperature inside a horizontal furnace and it shows a correlation coefficient value of 0.9695 with the K-type thermocouple readings. Such a system can be employed in an industrial furnace to measure the temperature with a higher accuracy.