Abstract
In manufacturing processes, inappropriate thermal distribution, which is observed in both steady and transient states of the thermal plant, leads to inferior quality. For a plant with strong thermal interaction, decoupling control is effective in precisely tuning the control system. We proposed the decoupling controller based on the temperature-difference feedback model. However, no parameter-identification method of thermal interaction has been presented so far. Traditionally, iterative tuning by trial and error has been used to tune the controller parameters. In the case of an industrial plant, the tuning time would be long because of the large time constants of the plant. Recently, the virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT) method, which can be used for off-line tuning of the controller parameters using a set of I/O data, has been studied to examine the possibility of shortening the tuning time. In this paper, a VRFT method for the feedback decoupling controller is proposed for a two-dimensional heat plate by taking consideration the thermal interaction property. The effectiveness of this VRFT method is evaluated by performing an experimental simulation.
