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PLC-based con­trol of a wind­ing plant with soft- and hard­ware from Mitsubishi

As part of his bachelor’s the­sis, Aaron Laufs is devel­op­ing a con­trol sys­tem for wind­ing sys­tems based on a mod­el with dancer and trac­tive force controls.

Moti­va­tion and background

In a past bach­e­lor the­sis we designed and imple­ment­ed a mod­el of a wind­ing line with PLC-based con­trol. The exist­ing test mod­el is now to be mod­i­fied and equipped with soft­ware and hard­ware from Mit­subishi. “Togeth­er with Mit­subishi, I will devel­op a con­trol basis for wind­ing appli­ca­tions, which can then be used flex­i­bly in the future for dif­fer­ent motor and sys­tem sizes,” says Aaron.

Aaron Laufs is cur­rent­ly a stu­dent at Aachen Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences in the field of automa­tion and dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy. After leav­ing school, he first trained as an elec­tron­ics tech­ni­cian for indus­tri­al engi­neer­ing and, while still in train­ing, earned his tech­ni­cal bac­calau­re­ate at night school. With his appren­tice­ship and some work expe­ri­ence, Aaron decid­ed to study full-time, which has now led him to QA since the begin­ning of this year. He fin­ished his intern­ship suc­cess­ful­ly and we are pleased that Aaron would like to com­plete the upcom­ing bach­e­lor the­sis with us.

The test setup

The Fis­chertech­nik mod­el sim­u­lates almost real con­di­tions. A feed unit in the mid­dle between the two wind­ing units sets the speed. On the left side, a dancer con­trol is imple­ment­ed. In this process, the mate­r­i­al is guid­ed behind the winder via a ver­ti­cal­ly freely mov­able dancer. If pos­si­ble, the dancer should always remain in a cen­tral posi­tion, and the con­trol sys­tem reacts to devi­a­tions from this posi­tion. The path is mea­sured by a slid­ing poten­tiome­ter. For the sec­ond method, ten­sion con­trol, a fixed deflec­tion pul­ley is used, with force sen­sors attached to its foun­da­tion. Here, the ten­sion on the pul­ley is used as the con­trolled variable.

Con­tent and outlook

In the com­ing months, Aaron will devel­op the con­trol base step by step using Mit­subishi com­po­nents. After famil­iar­iza­tion with the hard­ware, the wind­ing appli­ca­tion and the con­trol loop, the con­trolled vari­ables must be deter­mined and the con­trol loop imple­ment­ed. For this pur­pose, mod­ules are cre­at­ed with the GX Works 3 soft­ware, which per­form phys­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions. Sub­se­quent­ly, the entire con­trol loop is sim­u­lat­ed in the soft­ware and ini­tial tests are car­ried out. After that, the mod­el is con­vert­ed. For this pur­pose, our pre­mi­um sys­tem part­ner Mit­subishi pro­vides us with, among oth­er things, the RD78G4 motion con­troller, a J5 series ser­vo ampli­fi­er and the HK-KT12W ser­vo motor. The soft­ware will run on a MELSEC iQ‑R series controller.

We are look­ing for­ward to this excit­ing and inno­v­a­tive bach­e­lor the­sis and wish Aaron much suc­cess in the com­ing months.
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