Laminated windshield bending furnaces have always been controlled manually. Previously, several attempts at automatic control have been unsuccessfully tried. This is essentially due to the fact that this kind of plant is a strongly coupled multivariable system, with non-linearities and a large time delay. Another serious problem of the furnace to be controlled is the fact that it produces, successively and periodically, different types of windshields. So the plant is a time-varying system with periodic coefficients and disturbances. In this paper, an adequate combination of modern automatic control techniques, such as predictive control, an internal model and a Smith predictor have been used to obtain an original and efficient controller scheme for periodic plants. It has been tested on a real plant and has given satisfaction. An increase of the bending precision from 30 % to 100 % relative to the manual control has been obtained.
Multivariable predictive control of a laminated windshield bending furnace
Prädiktive Mehrgrößenregelung eines Ofens zum Biegen von laminierten Windschutzscheiben
Control Engineering Practice ; 4 , 7 ; 909-914
1996
6 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 16 Quellen
Article (Journal)
English