Model Predictive Control of a Powder Coating Curing Process: an Application of the MPC@CB Software

This paper deals with the control of a powder coating radiative curing process by infrared flow. It is based on a unidirectional dynamic modelling where both heat transfer and cure phenomena are accounted for within the thickness. The control problem is the constrained optimization of the curing cycle. This is solved using a special model predictive control framework: it is designed such that the calculation time is smaller that the sampling time (a few seconds), in spite of the need to solve the non-linear partial differential equation based model involved during the online constrained optimization task resolution. Simulation results show here the efficiency of the control software developed (MPC@CB) under Matlab. MPC@CB may be easily used for any other constrained control problem.