Research on the Coordination of Multiple Air Circulating Tempering Furnaces Using System Identification and Predictive Control in Manufacturing of Non-Combustible Aluminum Composite Panels

Non-combustible aluminum composite panel is a new type of green building and decoration material with high security. However, during its manufacturing process, the incongruity of temperature cyclings between a series of air circulating tempering furnaces on the production line may cause a serious negative impact on the stability of product quality. In this paper, a model of the temperature control system of a tempering furnace was built at first by applying parameter identification technique to the off-line data of the furnace. Then, an approach based on online parameter identification and model predictive control was proposed to solve the dilemma that the specific temperature range of one single tempering furnace and the temperature cyclings coordination of multiple tempering furnaces can not be attained at the same time when using PID or On-Off control method. A method was presented to optimize the phase difference between the temperature cyclings of differents furnaces’ to lower the fluctuation of product quality. Finally, experiments are used to demonstrate the descent in fluctuation using the methods proposed in this paper.