A multi-task prediction method for acid concentration based on attention-CLSTM

Abstract

The accurate measurement of acid concentration, including hydrogen chloride (HCl) and ferrous chloride concentrations (FeCl2), is a critical part of ensuring the quality of strip steel pickling. In this study, a multi-task attention convolutional long short-term memory (MACL) neural network model was proposed to predict hydrogen ion and ferrous ion concentrations simultaneously. Firstly, in order to extract significant information from the input sequence, an attention mechanism was added to the model to calculate the correlation between the input features and the acid concentration at each time step. Next, multi-task learning explores the connections between the two tasks and exploits hidden constraints to improve prediction accuracy. Finally, deep features were extracted through convolutional long short-term memory (CLSTM) neural network, and the acid concentration was predicted. The proposed MACL model was compared with other popular prediction models. The experimental results show that proposed MACL model generally outperforms other models, indicating that proposed model has excellent predictive performance and effectiveness.