IEEE Access (Jan 2025)

Hottel Zone Physics-Constrained Networks for Industrial Furnaces

  • Ujjal Kr Dutta,
  • Aldo Lipani,
  • Chuan Wang,
  • Yukun Hu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3563413
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13
pp. 75134 – 75156

Abstract

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This paper investigates a novel approach to improve the temperature profile prediction of furnaces in foundation industries, crucial for sustainable manufacturing. While existing methods like the Hottel Zone model are accurate, they lack real-time inference capabilities. Deep learning methods excel in speed and prediction but require careful generalization for real-world applications. We propose a regularization technique that leverages the Hottel Zone method to make deep neural networks physics-aware, improving prediction accuracy for furnace temperature profiles. Our approach demonstrates effectiveness on various neural network architectures, including Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Extended LSTM (xLSTM) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). We also discussion the data generation involved.

Keywords