Digital Shadow Induction Furnace for Heating Carbon Fibers

Abstract

The carbon fibers are widely used in industry due to their unique properties. First of all, carbon fibers are used as reinforcing components in modern composite materials. Mass production of carbon fiber requires the creation of new, high-performance industrial technologies that allow flexible control of the properties and quality of the resulting material. Organic fibers go through several stages of heat treatment to produce carbon fibers. The last stage is the graphitization - the most important stage for obtaining high quality carbon fibers. During the graphitization, the fiber is heated to temperatures of 2500 °C - 3000 °C. For graphitization of carbon fiber, it is proposed to use a continuous-type induction furnace, which is able to flexibly control the properties of carbon fibers at the outlet. For effective design and control of the induction furnace, its precise mathematical description, a complex model, which can work as a digital shadow of this installation, was developed. The experience of using the methods of mathematical modeling for the study and design of induction heating systems has shown their high efficiency in studying the processes occurring in induction heating devices, allowing to identify new patterns and receive design recommendations.