Apparatus and method for controlling the preheating temperature

Abstract

The apparatus and method control preheating temperature of equipment having a device to be preheated and a preheating device for start-up which includes a heat source and a heat source control device which has a plurality of heating patterns to control said heat source. The apparatus includes a temperature measuring device for measuring current temperature of the device to be preheated within the equipment, a computing device for calculating a predicted time that is required by the preheating device to preheat the device from the current temperature to a preset temperature, a comparison device by which the predicted time as calculated by the computing device is compared with a specified start-up time and a selecting device for selecting from the plurality of heating patterns within the heat source control device a heating pattern that makes the predicted time shorter than the start-up time. The method controls such that if the predicted time is longer than the specified start-up time, another heating pattern is selected and the predicted time is calculated again so that an appropriate heating pattern is selected by repeating the selection, the computation and the comparison until the predicted time becomes shorter than the specified start-up time.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.