Abstract

Combustion is at the core of many industrial activities, and it is still mainly tied to non-renewable and contaminating fuel sources. This situation calls for maximizing the efficiency of these types of processes, as well as reducing the contaminants produced. Extremum seeking control (ESC) has the potential to achieve the efficiency required. Here we identify a ladle furnace process using optical variables (OV). We test the options of a Hammerstein or Hammerstein-Wiener plant structures. We then propose an ESC design for the identified nonlinear plant model and simulate its operation. Finally, motivated by a future implementation of the designed ESC over a network, we analyze through simulations three communication networks features: the variance of a communication channel additive noise, the variance of a communication channel gain, and the probability of packetdropouts.