CA-MC-Transformer: An Operating Condition-Adaptive and Multi-Scale Convolution-Enhanced Transformer Architecture for Furnace Temperature Prediction

Regenerative aluminum melting serves as a core process in recycled aluminum production. In the regenerative aluminum melting process, the furnace temperature is a key variable which affects product performance and energy costs. The extreme in-furnace temperature necessitates sensors equipped with protective jackets, which increases measurement costs and severely compromises real-time monitoring capability. Accordingly, accurate furnace temperature prediction is highly valuable for regenerative aluminum melting. In regenerative aluminum melting furnaces, periodic burner nozzle commutation and frequent material charging and discharging lead to complex and time-varying operating conditions, posing considerable challenges to high-precision furnace temperature prediction. To address these issues, a condition-adaptive multi-scale convolution-enhanced Transformer (CA-MC-Transformer) model is proposed for furnace temperature prediction. Firstly, an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm based on the weighted dynamic time warping (WDTW) distance is designed to perform unsupervised clustering on historical process data, thereby extracting physically interpretable prior labels for macroscopic operating conditions. Secondly, multi-scale dilated causal convolutions are utilized to capture local dynamic features at diverse temporal resolutions. A soft attention mechanism is further introduced to dynamically assign fusion weights to condition embeddings and local features, enabling condition-adaptive feature reconstruction. Finally, the fused adaptive features are fed into an encoder-only Transformer network to capture the global long-range temporal dependencies and achieve accurate furnace temperature prediction. Comparative experiments conducted on real operational datasets from an aluminum plant verify that the proposed method effectively eliminates the inherent tracking lag of conventional deep learning models, and substantially improves prediction accuracy and anti-noise robustness under complex and variable operating conditions.