Control of the preheating of a casting mould as a distributed parameter system by PLC

This paper deals with the control of the preheating process of a casting mould formulated as a distributed parameter system and using a programmable logic controller (PLC). The control process is first optimized by a simulation procedure using a distributed parameter control loop. The temporal part of the control synthesis is implemented on the PLC in order to control the preheating of the casting mould. A controlled preheating process is demonstrated on the experimental casting mould with embedded sensors and actuators.