A New Model with Feedback Structure for Thermal Process and its Application to Decoupling Control

In thermal processes, thermal distribution on a heating plate is observed in both steady and transient states. Recently, uniform temperature control is extremely required in many industrial application fields for quality improvement. Conventional decoupling control based on a black-box model is cheap for the control of thermal plant with strong interference. In this paper a novel model with feedback structure that expresses the thermal interaction explicitly and its application to decoupling control are proposed. Firstly, the cell model is derived based on physical conservation law, and is applied to experimental plant, and the thermal distribution is simulated using the FEM method. The design of the decoupling controller using the proposed model is shown and the effectiveness is evaluated