Solar Thermal/Electricity Paint Curing Oven

This work presents solar thermal/electricity paint curing oven. It compares sliding mode control (SMC), to PID control of the oven system using MATLAB/Simulink 2014b model. The result shows that SMC has better performance due to its fast rise and settling time. The oven and solar thermal collector have been designed and implemented. The controller is micro-controller base, using C++ and the system can take multi reference inputs. The implemented system was practically tested to verify the performance of the controller and the energy savings due to the solar thermal. Experimental control results conform to the simulation results and the collector supplies 43.27% of the total energy required to operate the oven. A payback period on the cost of the collector installation has been calculated to be sixteen months for an average insolation of 200Wm
^-2
at seven hours per day.