Design of an Embedded Rapier Loom Controller and a Control Strategy Based on SRM

Abstract

Rapier looms are currently important equipment in the weaving process. The control system of the loom determines the performance of the loom, to a large extent. To effectively reduce the production cost and energy consumption and to improve the start-up performance and production efficiency of rapier looms in industrial production, this paper develops an integrated rapier loom control system based on the direct drive of a switched reluctance motor (SRM) spindle and conducts field tests and applications. The contribution and innovation of this paper is to develop a complete set of low-cost control systems, propose an SRM single neuron fuzzy PID speed control strategy based on voltage chopping control and use it for the control of the main shaft drive technology of rapier looms. The integrated rapier loom control system based on the SRM spindle direct drive proposed in this paper reduces the production costs and energy consumption and improves the start-up performance and production efficiency of the rapier loom. This text carries on the systematic plan design to the control system from the hardware system and the software system. First, according to actual needs, starting from the aspect of reducing control costs and combined with the characteristics of embedded systems, such as tailorability, low cost, and strong scalability, this paper proposes a control system hardware structure based on CAN bus communication and a fully embedded STM32. The control system is divided into multiple control modules, such as the main control module, the spindle drive module, and the power transmission coil module. The system conducts a distributed control to the loom through the CAN bus and is equipped with various communication interfaces, such as Ethernet and RS485. Second, combining the characteristics of the SRM with a simple structure, a large starting torque and the operation mode of the loom, the basic control mode of SRM voltage chopping control is determined. To improve the efficiency and start-up performance of the speed control system, the SRM single neuron PID control algorithm is proposed, and a single neuron is used to improve the PID parameters. On this basis, fuzzy control is introduced to adjust the output gain of a single neuron PID control online to improve the system performance and reduce system energy consumption. Finally, the entire set of rapier loom control systems was verified, tested and debugged on site. The results show that each functional circuit works normally, and that the designed control system can meet the speed response demand of the loom at 850 rpm and reduce the production cost and energy consumption. The comparison experiment between the single neuron fuzzy PID algorithm of the motor and the traditional PID control algorithm in the actual loom production process proves that the proposed control algorithm has a better dynamic response performance. The proposed control algorithm effectively improves the starting performance and production efficiency of rapier looms and meets the actual needs of industrial applications.