Infrared drying process of an experimental water painting: Model predictive control

This paper deals with the experimental control of an infrared drying process of a water based epoxyamine painting. This approach is based on a unidirectional diffusional modelling of infrared drying phenomena where both heat and mass transfers under shrinkage conditions are accounted for. The control problem is concerned with the tracking of any given trajectory for one of the characteristics (i.e. the temperature or the mean water content) during the drying cycle. This is solved using the well-known model predictive control framework where the non-linear diffusional model is directly used in the control formulation. Experimental results show the efficiency of the trajectory tracking. This method can be extended for more general constrained control problem.