Numerically Optimizing the Distribution of the Infrared Radiative Energy on a Surface of a Thermoplastic Sheet Surface

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of distributing uniformly the energy flux intercepted by a thermoplastic sheet surface during the infrared radiation. To do so, we discretized this problem and then formulated it as an integer linear programming problem, for which we applied two meta-heuristic algorithms namely the simulated annealing algorithm (SA) and harmony search algorithm (HSA), in order to minimize the corresponding objective function. The results produced by the numerical study we conducted on the performance of both algorithms are presented and discussed.