Differential Evolution and Heat Radiation Intensity Optimization

Abstract

This article focuses on heat radiation intensity optimization across the surface of an aluminium mould. The inner mould surface is sprinkled with a special PVC powder and the outer mould surface is warmed by infrared heaters located above the mould. This is an economic way of producing artificial leathers in the automotive industry (e.g. The artificial leather on a car dashboard). The article includes a description of a mathematical model that allows us to calculate the heat radiation intensity across the mould surface for every fixed location of the heaters. We also use this mathematical model to optimize the location of the heaters to provide approximately the same heat radiation intensity across the whole mould surface during the warming of the mould. In this way we obtain a uniform colour tone and material structure of the artificial leather. The problem of optimization is more complicated. Using gradient methods is not suitable because the minimized function contains many local extremes. A differential evolution algorithm is used during the process of optimization. The calculations were performed by a Mat lab code written by the authors. The article contains a practical example including graphical outputs.