A Multiobjective Optimization Method for the Thermal Insulation Designing of a Continuous-type Electric Furnace

A thermal designing problem was studied for an electric resistance vacuum furnace of the continuous-type used for the high temperature sintering process of new ceramic materials. This furnace has many small cells, and the static heat balance relations among each cell was described mathematically by investigating the spatially three-dimensional heat transfer phenomenon in detail. Then, a thermal insulation designing problem was formulated as a nonlinear multiobjective optimization problem, and the set of Pareto optimal solutions was derived by adopting both the weighting method and the generalized reduced gradient algorithm. As a result, the thickness of the heat insulator was determined optimally for each cell by minimizing both the total volume of the insulator and the total neat loss from the furnace coincidently.