Partial Differential Equation-Based Process Control for Ultraviolet Curing of Thick Film Resins

This paper proposes a feedback control system for curing thick film resins using ultraviolet (UV) radiation. A model-based distributed parameter control scheme is constructed for addressing the challenge of achieving through cure while reducing temperature gradients in thick films in composite laminates. The UV curing process is modeled with a parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) that includes an in-domain radiative input along with a nonlinear spatial attenuation function. The control problem is first cast as a distributed temperature trajectory-tracking problem where only surface temperature measurements are available. By transforming the original process model to an equivalent boundary input problem, backstepping boundary PDE control designs are applied to explicitly obtain both the controller and the observer gain kernels. Offline optimization may be used to generate the desired temperature trajectory, considering quality constraints such as prespecified spatial gradients and UV source limitations. The workings and the performance of the proposed control scheme are illustrated through simulations of the process model. It is shown that feedforward compensation can be added to achieve improved tracking with the PDE controller in the presence of measurement noise and other process disturbances.