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Article

Keywords:
heat radiation intensity; evolution optimization algorithm; mathematical model; experimental measurement; software implementation
Summary:
This article focuses on the heat radiation intensity optimization on the surface of an aluminium shell mould. The outer mould surface is heated by infrared heaters located above the mould and the inner mould surface is sprinkled with a special PVC powder. This is an economic way of producing artificial leathers in the automotive industry (e.g. the artificial leather on car dashboards). The article includes a description of a mathematical model that allows us to calculate the heat radiation intensity across the outer mould surface for every fixed location of the heaters. We also use this mathematical model for optimizing the locations of the heaters to generate uniform heat radiation intensity on the whole outer mould surface during the heating of the mould. In this way we obtain an even colour shade and material structure of the artificial leather. The problem of optimization is more complicated. Using gradient methods is not suitable because the minimized deviation function contains many local minima. A differential evolution algorithm is used during the process of optimization. The calculations were performed by a Matlab code written by the authors. The article contains a practical example including graphical outputs.
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