Gap control for a proportional floating vacuum pad

Author(s):  
J-C Renn ◽  
C-Y Chen ◽  
C-H Lu

In this article, a new proportional pneumatic floating vacuum pad is developed and constructed. There are two features concerning this new vacuum pad. The first is the inclusion of a proportional solenoid, which enables the continuously variable control of the suction force output. The floating mechanism design between the vacuum pad and the work-piece is the second feature, which is more preferable in real industries because it can protect the surface of the work-piece from scratches or other damage. Moreover, in addition to the open-loop gap control mode, two closed-loop gap control schemes are proposed in this paper. The first is the constant gap control. A preset gap is input to the controller as the command input that further drives the proportional solenoid to maintain a steady-state gap between the vacuum pad and the work-piece. In the second control approach, the gap between the vacuum pad and the work-piece is kept as large as possible to minimize the energy consumption. Both closed-loop control schemes are successfully implemented in this study.

Author(s):  
Daniel Guyot ◽  
Christian Oliver Paschereit

Active instability control was applied to an atmospheric swirl-stabilized premixed combustor using open loop and closed loop control schemes. Actuation was realised by two on-off valves allowing for symmetric and asymmetric modulation of the premix fuel flow while maintaining constant time averaged overall fuel mass flow. Pressure and heat release fluctuations in the combustor as well as NOx, CO and CO2 emissions in the exhaust were recorded. In the open loop circuit the heat release response of the flame was first investigated during stable combustion. For symmetric fuel modulation the dominant frequency in the heat release response was the modulation frequency, while for asymmetric modulation it was its first harmonic. In stable open loop control a reduction of NOx emissions due to fuel modulation of up to 19% was recorded. In the closed loop mode phase-shift control was applied while triggering the valves at the dominant oscillation frequency as well as at its second subharmonic. Both, open and closed loop control schemes were able to successfully control a low-frequency combustion instability, while showing only a small increase in NOx emissions compared to, for example, secondary fuel modulation. Using premixed open loop fuel modulation, attenuation was best when modulating the fuel at frequencies different from the dominant instability frequency and its subharmonic. The performance of asymmetric fuel modulation was generally slightly better than for symmetric modulation in terms of suppression levels as well as emissions. Suppression of the instability’s pressure rms level of up to 15.7 dB was recorded.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 666-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Altaher ◽  
Douglas Russell ◽  
Sumeet S. Aphale

Nanopositioners are mechanical devices that can accurately move with a resolution in the nanometer scale. Due to their mechanical construction and the piezoelectric actuators popularly employed in nanopositioners, these devices have severe performance limitations due to resonance, hysteresis and creep. A number of techniques to control nanopositioners, both in open-loop and closed-loop, have been reported in the literature. Closed-loop techniques clearly outperform open-loop techniques due to several desirable characteristics, such as robustness, high-bandwidth, absence of the need for tuning and high stability, along with others. The most popular closed-loop control technique reported is one where a damping controller is first employed in an inner loop to damp the mechanical resonance of the nanopositioner, thereby increasing achievable bandwidth. Consequently, a tracking controller, typically an Integral controller or a proportional–integral controller, is implemented in the outer loop to enforce tracking of the reference signal, thereby reducing the positioning errors due to hysteresis and creep dynamics of the employed actuator. The most popular trajectory a nanopositioner is forced to track is a raster scan, which is generated by making one axis of the nanopositioner follow a triangular trajectory and the other follow a slow ramp or staircase. It is quite clear that a triangle wave (a finite velocity, zero acceleration signal) cannot be perfectly tracked by a first-order integrator and a double integrator is necessary to deliver error-free tracking. However, due to the phase profile of the damped closed-loop system, implementing a double integrator is difficult. This paper proposes a method by which to implement two integrators focused on the tracking performance. Criteria for gain selection, stability analysis, error analysis, simulations, and experimental results are provided. These demonstrate a reduction in positioning error by 50%, when compared to the traditional damping plus first-order integral tracking approach.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. S. Huq ◽  
M. O. Tokhi

Spring brake orthotic swing phase for paraplegic gait is initiated through releasing the brake on the knee mounted with a torsion spring. The stored potential energy in the spring, gained from the previous swing phase, is solely responsible for swing phase knee flexion. Hence the later part of the SBO operation, functional electrical stimulation (FES) assisted extension movement of the knee has to serve an additional purpose of restoring the spring potential energy on the fly. While control of FES induced movement as such is often a challenging task, a torsion spring, being antagonistically paired up with the muscle actuator, as in spring brake orthosis (SBO), only adds to the challenge. Two new schemes are proposed for the control of FES induced knee extension movement in SBO assisted swing phase. Even though the control schemes are closed-loop in nature, special attention is paid to accommodate the natural dynamics of the mechanical combination being controlled (the leg segment) as a major role playing feature. The schemes are thus found to be immune from some drawbacks associated with both closed-loop tracking as well as open-loop control of FES induced movement. A leg model including the FES knee joint model of the knee extensor muscle vasti along with the passive properties is used in the simulation. The optimized parameters for the SBO spring are obtained from the earlier part of this work. Genetic algorithm (GA) and multi-objective GA (MOGA) are used to optimize the parameters associated with the control schemes with minimum fatigue as one of the control objectives. The control schemes are evaluated in terms of three criteria based on their ability to cope with muscle fatigue.


Author(s):  
Amit Pandey ◽  
Maurício de Oliveira ◽  
Chad M. Holcomb

Several techniques have recently been proposed to identify open-loop system models from input-output data obtained while the plant is operating under closed-loop control. So called multi-stage identification techniques are particularly useful in industrial applications where obtaining input-output information in the absence of closed-loop control is often difficult. These open-loop system models can then be employed in the design of more sophisticated closed-loop controllers. This paper introduces a methodology to identify linear open-loop models of gas turbine engines using a multi-stage identification procedure. The procedure utilizes closed-loop data to identify a closed-loop sensitivity function in the first stage and extracts the open-loop plant model in the second stage. The closed-loop data can be obtained by any sufficiently informative experiment from a plant in operation or simulation. We present simulation results here. This is the logical process to follow since using experimentation is often prohibitively expensive and unpractical. Both identification stages use standard open-loop identification techniques. We then propose a series of techniques to validate the accuracy of the identified models against first principles simulations in both the time and frequency domains. Finally, the potential to use these models for control design is discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (07) ◽  
pp. 1840017 ◽  
Author(s):  
QIN YAO ◽  
XUMING ZHANG

Flexible needle has been widely used in the therapy delivery because it can advance along the curved lines to avoid the obstacles like important organs and bones. However, most control algorithms for the flexible needle are still limited to address its motion along a set of arcs in the two-dimensional (2D) plane. To resolve this problem, this paper has proposed an improved duty-cycled spinning based three-dimensional (3D) motion control approach to ensure that the beveled-tip flexible needle can track a desired trajectory to reach the target within the tissue. Compared with the existing open-loop duty-cycled spinning method which is limited to tracking 2D trajectory comprised of few arcs, the proposed closed-loop control method can be used for tracking any 3D trajectory comprised of numerous arcs. Distinctively, the proposed method is independent of the tissue parameters and robust to such disturbances as tissue deformation. In the trajectory tracking simulation, the designed controller is tested on the helical trajectory, the trajectory generated by rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm and the helical trajectory. The simulation results show that the mean tracking error and the target error are less than 0.02[Formula: see text]mm for the former two kinds of trajectories. In the case of tracking the helical trajectory, the mean tracking error target error is less than 0.5[Formula: see text]mm and 1.5[Formula: see text]mm, respectively. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Machines ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiu-Keng Lai ◽  
Jhang-Shan Ciou ◽  
Chia-Che Tsai

Owing to the benefits of programmable and parallel processing of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), they have been widely used for the realization of digital controllers and motor drive systems. Furthermore, they can be used to integrate several functions as an embedded system. In this paper, based on Matrix Laboratory (Matlab)/Simulink and the FPGA chip, we design and implement a stepper motor drive. Generally, motion control systems driven by a stepper motor can be in open-loop or closed-loop form, and pulse generators are used to generate a series of pulse commands, according to the desired acceleration/run/deceleration, in order to the drive system to rotate the motor. In this paper, the speed and position are designed in closed-loop control, and a vector control strategy is applied to the obtained rotor angle to regulate the phase current of the stepper motor to achieve the performance of operating it in low, medium, and high speed situations. The results of simulations and practical experiments based on the FPGA implemented control system are given to show the performances for wide range speed control.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document