To ensure a long lifetime, many industrial products are painted. For an accurate protection, it is important to have a uniform painting. Here  the drying process plays a significant role. Therefore an optimal control of this process results in an improved painting quality and also allows to save energy.

 

Transient temperature distribution

The first step consists of physical simulation: the radiation of the lamps, the air flow in the oven and the heat conduction in the painting. After that the optimization method utilizes these simulation to calculate an optimal control of the lamps.

We consider a multicriterial  formulation of the optimization problem, because the different objectives are competing, e.g. a larger process time and a higher temperature yield an improved paint, but also result in a larger energy consumption.  Finally we illustrate the different solutions in a decision support software.