Patent ID: 6885907

Claim:
A method for online monitoring of transient operations in a continuous caster and predicting an impending transient-cast breakout or other process abnormality, comprising the following steps: retrieving historical process data of a plurality of selected process variables during a pre-defined transient operation duration, the resulting historical process data covering most of normal transient operation regions and being used to construct a modeling dataset; dividing modeling data in each transient operation into two stages, and synchronizing the modeling data separately with respect to a set of synchronization scales pre-defined by casting speed and casting strand length, respectively, in said two stages to define a series of observations forming a synchronized modeling dataset; performing a multi-way principal component analysis (MPCA) on said synchronized modeling dataset to develop a multivariate statistical model to benchmark normal transient operations; and calculating a loading matrix P, and values of principal components for each transient operation in the modeling dataset; computing test statistics at each observation over a predefined transient operation duration, for each transient operation in the modeling dataset, based on the multivariate statistical model; determining control limits for said test statistics and their contributions from each selected process variable; acquiring on-line process data of each selected process variable from a pre-defined start point to a current time t, in a new transient operation to be monitored; synchronizing the acquired online data based on the synchronization scales defined in the two stages, and predicting future process trajectories for the rest of said transient operation duration, namely, from said current time t to a predefined end point for said transient operation duration to create complete process trajectories; computing test statistics based on the multivariate statistical model for the resulting complete process trajectories of said new transient operation; comparing the test statistics computed from said new transient operation to their corresponding control limits; and generating at least one indication signal indicating whether said new transient operation is statistically different from its historical benchmark of normal operation in a continuous casting process.