Design and coordinated control of an industrial oven for rapid heating and spatial uniformity

Achieving rapid heating, low overshoot, and spatial temperature uniformity simultaneously remains challenging for large-volume industrial ovens because of strong thermal inertia, transport delay, nonlinear thermophysical behavior, and nonuniform convective heat distribution. This paper presents a control-oriented oven design and a practical coordinated control strategy for heater power and airflow regulation. A 270-L forced-convection oven with rotationally symmetric baffle openings and isomorphic airflow pathways is first developed to improve the open-loop thermal characteristics, thereby facilitating closed-loop regulation of the transient heating response and spatial temperature uniformity. A lumped-parameter nonlinear thermal model is then derived from energy conservation and expressed in a compact state-space form for predictive control. Based on this model, a finite-control-set model predictive controller regulates the quantized heater power through direct enumeration under explicit temperature and input constraints. Meanwhile, a model-free adaptive controller regulates the fan mass-flow command without requiring an explicit flow-field model. The complete scheme is implemented on an industrial PLC and experimentally validated on the developed oven platform. Rolling-horizon prediction validation based on successive 30-s-ahead predictions yields an RMSE of 2.01 ° C and an R 2 of 0.96. In closed-loop experiments, the oven reaches 95% of the 85 ° C setpoint in 733.66 s, with an average steady-state deviation of 0.19 ° C and a maximum overshoot of 0.46 ° C . Under a severe door-opening disturbance, the temperature and spatial-uniformity indicators recover to their prescribed ranges within 113.58 s and 21.74 s, respectively. Comparative experiments against a model-optimized two-degree-of-freedom PID controller and constant-airflow operation further demonstrate the effectiveness and practical implementability of the proposed coordinated framework.