Prediction of Energy Consumption in Horizontal Roughing Process of Hot Rolling Strip Based on TDADE Algorithm

The steel industry is the key industry of energy consumption. The optimization of rolling process parameters is an effective measure to reduce and optimize energy consumption. Accurate energy consumption prediction has an indispensable guiding function in the planning of process parameters. However, the traditional energy consumption prediction and machine learning methods have been unable to fit the needs of high precision and reliability. Taking the horizontal roughing process (HRP) of hot rolling process as the research object, this paper mainly introduces an energy consumption prediction mechanism model (ECPMM) based on a roller adaptive wear strategy by analyzing the strip forming mechanism and rolling process. Then, two directions adaptive differential evolution (TDADE) algorithm is proposed based on a novel adaptive strategy. This algorithm has better convergence speed and global optimization ability than other optimization algorithms in the parameter optimization of ECPMM. We carried out comparative experiments on five machine learning algorithms. The results show that the ECPMM optimized by TDADE is superior to the five machine learning algorithms in prediction accuracy and stability. Finally, we conducted ablation experiments on the energy consumption characteristics of the HRP process, which turns out that using a smaller reduction and roller radius can reduce energy consumption. Summarizing the above experimental results suggests that the ECPMM has high accuracy and robustness, and satisfies the requirements of practical application. Note to Practitioners—It is necessary to carry out the deep analysis and research of energy consumption prediction involved in the process planning of strip hot rolling, the inspiration of this article is stem from this point. The commonly used energy consumption prediction methods include mechanism modeling and machine learning, but both have disadvantages, like low prediction accuracy and black box, which must have to be performed to solve by adapting the production demand of high reliability. In this paper, the combination of the mechanism model and data-driven method is used to realize the accurate prediction of energy consumption and improve the reliability of the model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper about the research on energy consumption prediction of hot rolling process based on mechanism model and data-driven, especially in data size, time granularity, algorithm design, and prediction performance. Such research is helpful to guide engineers to design rolling energy consumption. We will dive a bit deeper into learning the energy consumption and process parameters during the rolling process in future studies.