DESIGN OF MODEL REFERENCE ADAPTIVE CONTROL BASED TEMPERATURE CONTROL FOR GLASS MELTING FURNACE

Abstract

The glass manufacturing process is a complex and non-linear process. The quality of the final glass product depends on the temperature profile of the molten glass within a glass melting furnace. Inappropriate variations in the molten glass temperature affect the physical properties of the glass. In order to maintain the quality of the product, the temperature of the molten glass in the furnace must be monitored and controlled by a control system. The designing and testing of a controller require an appropriate process model that describes the process dynamics with enough accuracy. The modeling was distributed by applying energy balance using thermodynamic and energy conservation laws and a state-space model was derived from the energy balance equations. The temperature of glass melting is critical for the assembly of glass containers which are produced in continuous glass melt tank furnaces. Raw materials are continuously charged onto the glass melt to make batch blanket. The temperature of the glass melting determines the quantity of glass in the gob which is placed in the mold and thus affects the quality of the finished container. There are frequent temperatures fluctuations in the glass as it exits the main furnace .The aim of this thesis is to design MIT and lyapunov rule based model reference adaptive control for temperature of glass melting furnace. The controller parameters are adjusted automatically using adaptive adjustment mechanism .In this case the error between reference model output and actual output of the glass melting furnace is minimized. The temperature control of glass furnace based on MIT and lyapunov rule is simulated using MATLAB/ SMULINK and its performance is compared with conventional PID controller. The simulation has shown that performance of the model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is better than PID controller