Condition Recognition Strategy Based on Fuzzy Clustering with Information Granulation for Blast Furnace

The temperature of the cooling stave (TCS) is an important state parameter to indicate the states of the slag crust during the blast furnace ironmaking process. The state of the slag crust affects the quality and production of pig iron, and the gas flow distribution in the blast furnace. Thus, it is necessary to recognize the states of the slag crust. This article proposes a condition recognition strategy based on fuzzy clustering endowed with a novel distance with information granulation for recognizing the states of the slag crust. First, the raw TCS time-series data are split into segments according to the appropriate segmentation length, and the segments are represented in a granular form by the information granulation method. Then, information granules are clustered using fuzzy clustering endowed with a novel distance. After completing the data representation, each information granule is compounded of a lower bound and an upper bound that indicate the dynamic characteristics of the corresponding segments. In the fuzzy clustering, information granulation distance, a new distance, is established to measure the similarity between two information granules. Finally, the data experiments using the datasets from the UCR time-series database and actual industrial data from the blast furnace demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed condition recognition strategy.