The long-term use of steel strip in various industries makes it an important semi-finished product, which makes it necessary to improve its chemical composition and mechanical properties, reduce its thickness and weight, expand the range of new types of steel strip and increase its production. This entails a large number of technological operations dependent on precise temperature measurement and control. In some industrial plants, the steel strip is in continuous motion, which makes the use of contact measuring devices impossible. When using non-contact measuring devices such as pyrometers or thermal imaging cameras, the emissivity of the materials being measured is a problematic parameter, as setting an incorrect emissivity value to the measuring device results in inaccurate temperature readings. The essence of this research was to establish a measurement method and to perform experimental measurements of the emissivity of a polished steel strip used in a continuous annealing line, the subsequent processing of the data from these measurements and their evaluation. The emissivity measurements were carried out for 5 types of steel strip of different parameters, while the measurement itself was carried out in the long wavelength range of 7.5–14 µm and at strip temperatures of 100–300 °C. Depending on the type of steel strip, the mean emissivity values ranged from 0.0835– to 0.1143. The emissivity of the steel strip increased with increasing strip temperature, and it was not a linear dependence. The emissivity values determined in this research could be applied to measuring equipment in actual production, which could improve the accuracy of temperature measurement in the heat treatment of polished steel strip. Thermal camera measurements in the long wavelength range, taking thermal images and their processing and determining the emissivity value of polished steel strips are the parts of this research that make it different from other already published research.

Reducing energy consumption and increasing energy efficiency have been especially topical issues recently, affecting all areas of energy consumption, including industrial sectors. Continuous annealing lines, as important industrial production facilities, operate with high energy consumption, which can be analyzed and optimized using predictive mathematical models. For the purpose of this paper, a mathematical model was developed to compare five variants of different excess combustion air operating with the same heat input and fuel consumption. The reference variant had an excess combustion air with a value of 1.279 and the steel strip temperature at the outlet of the heating chamber was 609.5 °C. In terms of energy savings, variant 1 can be considered as the optimal variant, which had an excess combustion air value of 1.15 and a steel strip temperature at the outlet of the heating chamber of 637.3 °C.