In the steel industry, the steel bars coming out from the last stand of the rolling train must be conveyed to the cooling bed. For this purpose, various types of devices are used in the different steel factories. In this paper, the rotating channel used in a single steel company is described and investigated. The problem of deriving an adequate dynamic model for the rotating channel is tackled; the model is then exploited to design a controller which can be employed in the real application of the rotating channel. A lumped parameter model of the rotating channel has been designed and used in this work. Moreover, a distributed parameter model has also been implemented, so as to be able to compare the two models and to evaluate the error made by using the lumped parameter model instead of the distributed parameter model. The lumped parameter model has then been used as a basis for the implementation of a time-varying control scheme, which is also presented in the paper. The control has then been successfully tested on an accurate simulator of the plant. The results obtained from the tests have been very encouraging.
