Analysis of heat transfer in the rapid thermal processing of the plasma display panel

Numerical analysis has been carried out to analyze the combined conductive and radiative heat transfer in the annealing process using the RTP system. The finite volume and discrete ordinates methods are used to solve the energy and radiative transfer equations, respectively. The temperature distribution in the panel depends strongly on the operating conditions. The process depends on the operating conditions such as lamp intensity, panel transport velocity, process length, ambient gas temperatures, etc. The temperature in the RTP section increases very rapidly first due to the intensive radiant heating and reaches the maximum. However the temperature decreases after the opaque dielectric is changed to a semi-transparent medium. The temperature differences/gradients of the panel are small in the pre-heating and post-heating sections but are very large in the RTP section, which may result in the large thermal stress and displacement to cause the considerable damage of the panel. Thus, the simulations using the present computer program are useful to obtain the optimal operating conditions and to produce the panel of good quality.