Data-driven robust design for a curing oven

If no external control is employed, the cure performance will be fully dependent on the oven design. Design of such a system is challenging because of its inherent complexity: complex heat transfer, unknown relationship between design variable and curing performance, unknown boundary conditions and large parameter variation, and so on. In this paper, a novel data-based robust design approach is proposed to design a new curing oven with simple structure. First, a modeling method with hybrid singular value decomposition and response surface method is developed to extract the system model from experimental data. The coupling influence between design variable and model parameter is also separated to make the design simpler, because only the part affected by design variable will be considered in the design. A robust design method is then developed to minimize the influence of parameter variation on the performance. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in the design of the new curing oven. © 2011-2012 IEEE.