Optimal flatness based control for heating processes in the glass industry

This work deals with a heat transfer process and an optimal control of an inhomogeneous partial differential equation describing this process. One considers a glass feeder gate, which is present at many glass manufacturers. The use of the offered study is a development of an optimal feedforward control for dynamic behavior of this heating process. A mathematical model of the glass feeder gate is presented by a nonlinear distributed parameter system. The control design is based on approaches of a flatness description of dynamic systems and a parameterization of a reference trajectory for the optimization of the dynamical behaviour. The control strategy must be sufficient for a number of requirements to process (e.g. output temperature at the end of the feeder gate) and must provide optimum quality criteria (consumption of power). Some simulation results are included and demonstrate the efficiency of the control.