Predictive Temperature Control of an Industrial Heating Process

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to control the temperature of an industrial heating process where a workpiece is transported through a heating unit in order to reach a certain temperature. To control this process is challenging due to the variable and possibly abruptly changing feed rate while requiring the final workpiece temperature to be maintained at a constant value. The speed itself cannot be influenced by the control system. However, its future trajectory is known to a certain extent at runtime. A model predictive controller is presented, which is characterized by the fact that the prediction horizon is dynamically adjusted to the transportation speed, that the traveled distance of the workpiece within the horizon is constant. Moreover, the step size of the integrator is also adapted, yielding a constant number of integration steps despite large variations in velocity. Because of the special structure of the used model, the system state cannot be reused from one time step to the next and needs to be reconstructed in a receeding horizon fashion, even if the model was perfect. This is also a distinctive feature of the presented control scheme. Simulation and measurement results are provided, showing that the presented controller achieves promising results and outperforms the existing lookup-table-based controller currently in use.