Designing Continuous Radiation Ovens Using Gradient Optimization Technique

Continuous radiation ovens are of widely used apparatuses in paint cure and coating industries. The most important issue that guarantee the quality of paint curing is suitable thermal condition. Designing of these ovens for curing paint on bodies of complex geometries has become a challenge for many years. In the present study a new designing approach is introduced and advised because of its acceptable capabilities as well as its high speed. This approach is based on cure window criterion and applies gradient optimization technique. The present work can be divided into two parts: first, geometric and thermal simulation of the curing body and second, preparing the design tool.Since a significant part of designing procedure usually devotes the iterations of optimization procedure, defining a proper objective function efficiently reduces the time consumed for designing procedure. Procedure of finding an appropriate objective function has been comprehensively discussed in the present article. In this regard a new approach, called Hybrid method, applying an objective function based on few number of elements on the curing body is introduced. That is more fast and capable relative to other methods addressed in this study. Capability of the proposed methods is then evaluated for a typical complicated geometry.