Abnormality Detection of Blast Furnace Tuyere Based on Knowledge Distillation and a Vision Transformer

Abstract

The blast furnace tuyere is a key position in hot metal production and is primarily observed to assess the internal state of the furnace. However, detecting abnormal tuyere conditions has relied heavily on manual judgment, leading to certain limitations. We proposed a tuyere abnormality detection model based on knowledge distillation and a vision transformer (ViT) to address this issue. In this approach, ResNet50 is employed as the Teacher model to distill knowledge into the Student model, ViT. Firstly, we introduced spatial attention modules to enhance the model’s perception and feature-extraction capabilities for different image regions. Furthermore, we simplified the depth of the ViT and improved its self-attention mechanism to alleviate training losses. In addition, we employed the knowledge distillation strategy to achieve model lightweighting and enhance the model’s generalization capability. Finally, we evaluate the model’s performance in tuyere abnormality detection and compare it with other classification methods such as VGG-19, ResNet-101, and ResNet-50. Experimental results showed that our model achieved a classification accuracy of 97.86% on a tuyere image dataset from a company, surpassing the original ViT model by 1.12% and the improved ViT model without knowledge distillation by 0.34%. Meanwhile, the model achieved a competitive classification accuracy of 90.31% and 77.65% on the classical fine-grained image datasets, Stanford Dogs and CUB-200-2011, respectively, comparable to other classification models.

Study of Tuyere Combustion Flame Temperature in Vanadium and Titanium Blast Furnaces by Machine Vision and Colorimetric Thermometry

“…Despite the above problems, the lack of an effective detection system has rendered the blast furnace a 'black box' for a long time, which could be attributed to its high-temperature, high-pressure smelting environment [6]. Actually, as the only window in the lower part that can observe the inside of the blast furnace, the tuyere zone is highly valued by operators and researchers for its ability to intuitively reflect the combustion state of the raceway, high-temperature gases, and the degree of damage to the tuyere cooling equipment [7].…”