Performance improvement of industrial induction mould heating oven

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental and numerical investigation of heat distribution in an industrial induction mould heating oven. The study aims to develop an improved coil arrangement and oven design to generate uniform heat distribution, while improving the thermal efficiency. ANSOFT Maxwell software was used to simulate the electromagnetic behaviour and the eddy currents in the workpiece. The ANSOFT results were linked with ANSYS transient thermal software to simulate the heat generation and temperature distribution in the workpiece. An experimental setup was developed to validate the simulations. ZVS2000 induction module was used in the experiments and the current outputs of the module were calculated using Multisim software. The simulation results showed a good agreement with the experimental data. The experimental and simulation results were used to study the cooling effect and the effect of using a flux concentrator. The flux concentrator increased the oven overall efficiency by 7.5 percent. The simulations were further extended to analyze how the current frequency, coil design, and flux material influence on the eddy current formation in the workpiece. Based on the simulation results, an improved coil design was proposed with higher thermal efficiency and uniform temperature distribution.