Optimisation of burning loss in reheating furnace of hot rolling mill using Taguchi technique

Most of the steel rolling mills are facing a great problem of large volume of burning losses in reheating furnace. The losses are nearly 3.5% to 4%. Literature review indicates that there is no specific methodology available to control the burning loss to its lowest possible valve. We have conducted a series of experiments in a steel rolling mill using Taguchi methodology (L9 orthogonal array) and analysed it using Minitab software. In this experimentation, temperature, soaking zone time and surface area of the raw material was considered as a process parameter with three levels and burning loss as a response variable. ANOVA is performed to provide information about the significance of the process parameters to affect the response variable. The confirmation experiment was conducted using the optimum values of the process parameters. The confirmation experiment results in the burning loss value of 1.1837% which is very near to the experimental value. This indicates the robustness of the design of our experiment.