Optimal Heater Control with Technology of Fault Tolerance for Compensating Thermoforming Preheating System

Abstract

The adjustment of heater power is very important because the distribution of thickness strongly depends on the distribution of sheet temperature. In this paper, the steady state optimum distribution of heater power is searched by numerical optimization in order to get uniform sheet temperature. In the following step, optimal heater power distribution with a damaged heater was found out using the technology of fault tolerance, which will be used to reduce the repairing time when some heaters are damaged. The merit of this work is that the design variable was the power of each heater which can be directly used in the preheating process of thermoforming.