Determination of Optimum Lining Thickness for a Heating Furnace.

We discuss the problem of determining optimum thicknesses for the refractory and thermal insulation layers to minimize the total cost of the lining and the fuel used to compensate for thermal losses. The proposed methodology (with the required temperature at the boundary of the lining layers specified as an additional condition) reduces the 2D constrained optimization problem for a cost function with a locus of discontinuity but no unconstrained minima to the problem of determining the minimum of a unimodal 1D cost function. The work described in this paper is highly relevant because a major furnace overhaul may involve the use of new materials and costs can be optimized by using new data on available materials and their pricing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]