A study on tension behavior considering thermal effects in roll-to-roll E-printing

Abstract

The mathematical model for tension in a moving web by Shin [1] was extended by considering thermal strain due to temperature fluctuations in the drying of a roll-to-roll system. The extended model describes variations in tension and includes terms that represent the change of the Young’s Modulus, the thermal coefficient, and the thermal strain. In this paper, a new control scheme based on the extended model is proposed for mitigation of tension disturbances due to thermal strain in the drying process. Tension feedback control logic generally is not be applied due to the fact that register errors can be induced by speed alterations that help to compensate for tension disturbances. But in our approach, the thermal strain in the web is compensated for by means of velocity adjustments without adding extra register errors in the steady state. A computer simulation followed by an experimental validation was carried out to confirm the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed model is useful for describing tension behavior and suggest that tension control logic improves control precision for the drying module of a roll-to-roll e-printing system.