Abstract The process of drying/curing automobile painting is characterized as one of the main stages in automobile assembly. To guarantee the final painting quality, optimal operating conditions (mainly the temperature profile in the painting chamber) must be satisfied, and they are empirically defined in most cases. The availability of a mathematical model in transient regime enables the prediction of the drying/curing process behavior and consequences of possible operational changes on the final quality of the paint. However, obstacles continue to exist with respect to the implementation of the aforementioned types of models given the large number of parameters and complexity involved in their determination among which convection heat transfer coefficients are notable. Thus, the study presents a methodology to adjust the mathematical model of a paint-curing oven via determining convection heat transfer coefficients based on industrial data. The adjusted model was used to predict new operational scenarios for the most commonly used oven in automobile painting processes, namely the Elpo oven. The results indicate that the proposed methodology can be applied as a tool to develop operational optimization strategies that result in decreasing rework and energy costs without compromising painting quality.

中文翻译：

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汽车喷漆工艺：通过调整对流传热系数来最大限度地降低能耗

摘要 汽车涂装干燥/固化过程是汽车装配的主要阶段之一。为了保证最终的涂装质量，必须满足最佳操作条件（主要是涂装室内的温度曲线），并且在大多数情况下都是凭经验确定的。瞬态数学模型的可用性能够预测干燥/固化过程行为以及可能的操作变化对涂料最终质量的影响。然而，鉴于上述类型模型的确定涉及大量参数和复杂性，其中对流传热系数是显着的，因此在实施上述类型的模型方面仍然存在障碍。因此，该研究提出了一种方法，通过根据工业数据确定对流热传递系数来调整油漆固化炉的数学模型。调整后的模型用于预测汽车喷漆过程中最常用的烤箱（即 Elpo 烤箱）的新操作场景。结果表明，所提出的方法可以用作开发操作优化策略的工具，从而在不影响涂装质量的情况下减少返工和能源成本。