Slip Model Adaptation Based on Measurements of the Strip Velocity

In hot strip rolling, the strip tension is an important process variable. It directly depends on the mass flow of the rolled material. In this paper, a simple and reliable measurement system for the mass flow in hot strip rolling is described and its accuracy is analyzed. Based on such a measurement, slip models, which are often only a by-product of roll gap models, can be validated and tuned. An adaptation approach for slip models using an additional disturbance input is proposed and a method for identifying this disturbance is presented. This adaptation approach significantly improves the accuracy of the computed strip velocity compared to state-of-the-art approaches relying on roll gap models like Sims’ model or the hydrodynamic model.