Boundary Condition Design to Heat a Moving Object at Uniform Transient Temperature Using Inverse Formulation

Abstract

The boundary condition design of a three-dimensional furnace that heats an object moving along a conveyor belt of an assembly line is considered. A furnace of this type can be used by the manufacturing industry for applications such as industrial baking, curing of paint, annealing or manufacturing through chemical deposition. The object that is to be heated moves along the furnace as it is heated following a specified temperature history. The spatial temperature distribution on the object is kept isothermal through the whole process. The temperature distribution of the heaters of the furnace should be changed as the object moves so that the specified temperature history can be satisfied. The design problem is transient where a series of inverse problems are solved. The process furnace considered is in the shape of a rectangular tunnel where the heaters are located on the top and the design object moves along the bottom. The inverse design approach is used for the solution, which is advantageous over a traditional trial-and-error solution where an iterative solution is required for every position as the object moves. The inverse formulation of the design problem is ill-posed and involves a set of Fredholm equations of the first kind. The use of advanced solvers that are able to regularize the resulting system is essential. These include the conjugate gradient method, the truncated singular value decomposition or Tikhonov regularization, rather than an ordinary solver, like Gauss-Seidel or Gauss elimination.