Sliding mode controllers for a tempered glass furnace

This paper investigates the design of two sliding mode controllers (SMCs) applied to a tempered glass furnace system. The main objective of the proposed controllers is to regulate the glass plate temperature, the upper-wall temperature and the lower-wall temperature in the furnace to a common desired temperature. The first controller is a conventional sliding mode controller. The key step in the design of this controller is the introduction of a nonlinear transformation that maps the dynamic model of the tempered glass furnace into the generalized controller canonical form; this step facilitates the design of the sliding mode controller. The second controller is based on a state-dependent coefficient (SDC) factorization of the tempered glass furnace dynamic model. Using an SDC factorization, a simplified sliding mode controller is designed. The simulation results indicate that the two proposed control schemes work very well. Moreover, the robustness of the control schemes to changes in the system's parameters as well as to disturbances is investigated. In addition, a comparison of the proposed control schemes with a fuzzy PID controller is performed; the results show that the proposed SDC-based sliding mode controller gave better results.