Artificial leather production in the automotive industry

This article is focused on the process of artificial leather production in the automotive industry (e.g. the artificial leather on a car dashboard). One successful manufacturing process is the heating of the mould surface by infrared heaters located above the mould. We will describe one model of mould warming, as well as a method to calculate the heat radiation intensity on the mould surface in order to pinpoint the location of infrared heaters. During the calculation of heat radiation intensity across the mould surface, we will use experimental measured values for the heat radiation intensity from a sensor in proximity to an infrared heater. It is necessary to maintain approximately the same heat radiation intensity across the whole mould surface during warming process. The model described in this article allows us to optimize the infrared heaters´ location for this purpose. In this way, we obtain the same material structure and color tone across the whole surface of an artificial leather. We will apply a genetic algorithm to optimize the heaters´ location. A computational procedure of heat radiation intensity across mould surface and heaters location optimization was programmed in the language Matlab. The last chapter provides a practical example with a description of the solution.