Optimal Design of High Temperature Vacuum Furnace Using Thermal Analysis Database

Optimization study has been carried out to design an energy efficient, high temperature vacuum furnace which satisfies users' design requirements. First of all, the transient temperature distribution and the uniform temperature zone results have been compared with the steady state results to validate the feasibility of using steady state solution when constructing the thermal analysis DB. In order to check the accuracy, the interpolated results using thermal analysis DB have been compared with the computational and the experimental results. In this study, total heat flux is selected as the objective function, and the geometry parameters of vacuum furnace including the thickness of insulator, the heat zone sizes and the interval between heater and insulator are the design variables. The Uniform temperature zone sizes and the wall temperature are imposed as the design constraints. With negligible computational cost a high temperature vacuum furnace which has 40 similar to 60% reduction in total heat flux is designed using thermal analysis DB.