Experimental Results in the Modeling and Control of a Small Furnace

A dynamic model is developed to control the temperature of a specimen in a laboratory furnace. The control variables are the power input to the furnace and the rate of airflow inside the chamber. For a constant airflow input, the furnace can be represented by a linear model and a static gain dependent on the sample temperature. The power input to the furnace is perturbed with a pseudorandom binary sequence and the model parameters are estimated from the input-output measurements. The controller parameters are selected to minimize the variance in the sample temperature.