Copper sintering in a solar furnace through fuzzy control

In this paper, the automatic control of the process of copper sintering is addressed. The approach presented includes additional difficulties because the process is conditioned by the power source being solar energy and the intrinsic non-linearities of a solar furnace housing. Intelligent control capabilities come useful when a great degree of variability in tests and temperature patterns are in scope, so that a fuzzy control strategy is applied. A study of different plausible membership function partitions of the input universes of discourse has been undertaken, leading to distinct fuzzy rule bases constructed out of the expert operators knowledge through both direct enquiring and analysis of manual-controlled test performed in recent copper sintering test campaigns. The controller follows a Mamdani type with a Triangular Partition rule based inference system, which yields very promising results on the plant.