Inverse optimal design of the radiant heating in materials processing and manufacturing

Combined convective, conductive, and radiative heat transfer is analyzed du ring heating of a continuously moving load in the industrial radiant oven. A transient, quasi-three-dimensional model of heat transfer between a conti nuous load of parts moving inside an oven on a conveyor belt at a constant speed and an array of radiant heaters/burners placed inside the furnace enc losure is developed. The model accounts for radiative exchange between the heaters and the load, heat conduction in the load, and convective heat tran sfer between the moving load and oven environment. The thermal model develo ped has been used to construct a general framework for an inverse optimal d esign of an industrial oven as an example. In particular, the procedure bas ed on the Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least squares optimization algorith m has been developed to obtain the optimal temperatures of the heaters/burn ers that need to be specified to achieve a prescribed temperature distribut ion of the surface of a load. The results of calculations for several sampl e cases are reported to illustrate the capabilities of the procedure develo ped for the optimal inverse design of an industrial radiant oven.