Energy-Saving Extremal Control of an Electrical Mode for Electric Arc Units

The aim of this research is to determine a rationale and build a system for electrical mode control to ensure the maximum possible hourly capacity of an electric arc unit. To achieve this objective, a double-circuit control structure with independent stabilizing and optimizing control circuits is proposed. To build the optimizing circuit, the principles of extremal control and fuzzy logic are used to choose the optimum current and arc power of the processing unit. Simulations of production revealed that it took 28 s to achieve an optimum mode from the moment of arc ignition, and when increasing the number of taps on the furnace transformer from 14 to 23, the system achieved the optimum mode of power consumption in 12 s. To transfer this control approach to electric arc units in production, the developed and tested software system based on the optimized circuit for electrical mode control would require only adaptation to relevant conditions without major changes.