TUCer / Diploma thesis · Technical University of Crete
Composite Curing Oven.
A purpose-built oven to produce the CFRP wheel's carbon-fibre components — thermal design modelled and validated in Simulink before the first panel was cut.
FIG. 01 — Composite curing oven, built for TUCer
Requirements & thermal model
The brief: hold up to 120°C, ramp at up to 3°C/min, and stay within ±1°C once stable — tight enough to cure the wheel's resin reliably without over- or under-curing any part of it.
Before building anything, I modelled the oven as a lumped-parameter thermal network in MATLAB/Simulink: capacitance nodes for the heating elements, air, liner, and insulation, connected by conduction and convection resistances. Different insulation materials and thicknesses were traded off in simulation to hit the spec with the least installed power — about 300 W average for a typical cure profile, against 1.6 kW installed (2×800 W elements) for ramp margin and headroom to scale up later.
Build
The chamber is 940×970×600 mm (0.55 m³ working volume): an 18 mm OSB shell with seams sealed in aluminum tape, lined with 30 mm of chimney-grade rockwool insulation. Two 1Ω, 800W DC resistance elements provide heat, with forced-air circulation and two K-type thermocouples (air and wall) feeding a PID loop that drives a MOSFET power stage via PWM.
In production use
Simulated performance met spec: both temperature plateaus (80°C and 120°C) held with small steady-state error, and the target ramp rate was achievable within the installed power budget.
In real use, the oven ran every one of the wheel's cure cycles — 16 hours at 60°C per the resin manufacturer's spec — and the molds it cured against showed no deformation or wear after many thermal cycles. Measured thermocouple logs to pair directly against the simulated profile are still on the list to capture.
Every part it cured went on to the instrumented test bench for physical validation against the wheel's FEA predictions.