Identification of industrial furnace temperature for sintering process in nuclear fuel fabrication using NARX neural networks

Nonlinear system identification is becoming an important tool which can be used to improve control performance and achieve robust fault-tolerant behavior. Among the different nonlinear identification techniques, methods based on neural network model are gradually becoming established not only in the academia, but also in industrial application. An identification scheme of nonlinear systems for sintering furnace temperature in nuclear fuel fabrication using neural network autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NNARX) model investigated in this paper. The main contribution of this paper is to identify the appropriate model and structure to be applied in control temperature in the sintering process in nuclear fuel fabrication, that is, a nonlinear dynamical system. Satisfactory agreement between identified and experimental data is found with normalized sum square error 1.9e-03 for heating step and 6.3859e-08 for soaking step. That result shows the model successfully predict the evolution of the temperature in the furnace.