Adaptive decoupling predictive temperature control for an extrusion barrel in a plastic injection molding process

This paper presents an adaptive decoupling temperature control for an extrusion barrel in a plastic injection molding process. After establishing a stochastic polynomial matrix model of the system, a corresponding decoupling system representation was then developed. The decoupling control design was derived based on the minimization of a generalized predictive performance criterion. The set-point tracking, disturbance rejection, and robustness capabilities of the proposed method can be improved by appropriate adjustments to the tuning parameters in the criterion function. A real-time control algorithm, including the recursive least-squares method, is proposed which was implemented using a digital signal processor TMS320C31 from Texas Instruments. Through the experimental results, the proposed method has been shown to be powerful under set-point changes, load disturbances, and significant plant uncertainties. The proposed control law is shown to be less computational and more effective than other well-known multivariable control strategies, and more powerful than single-loop temperature-zone control policies.