Extended structure of MEC for thermal process

Recently, high-performance temperature control for the thermal process is becoming important with high quality of heat-treated product such as semiconductors. The dynamics of the thermal process is varied by setting the product for fabrication. Therefore, a modeling error between the system and the model exists and we cannot obtain intended output by this error. To minimize the modeling error, the model error compensator(MEC) has been proposed. The compensated system by MEC is used instead of the plant. The entire system works well because the compensated system is similar to the plant model. However, it is difficult to apply MEC for the thermal process because it is a kind of infinite dimension systems. Here, we have proposed extended MEC for the thermal processing system. In this paper, we use a high-order model to improve control performance and propose the MEC with parallel feed-forward compensator. The compensator form is designed based on the Smith predictor for thermal process to overcome delay component. The effectiveness is illustrated by using numerical examples.