Virtual sensing and virtual metrology for spatial error monitoring of roll-to-roll manufacturing systems

Abstract

Roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing techniques are promising for the high-volume continuous production of substrate-based products for a variety of emerging technologies such as flexible printing electronics, biosensors, thin film batteries. However, meeting the tight tolerance requirements of the R2R printed products has become a major challenge in R2R. This paper focuses on integrating kinematics modelling and data-driven surrogate models to fundamentally understand the spatial error generation and variation propagation mechanism within a multi-step R2R system, and provides a novel method to devise accurate virtual sensing for effective process monitoring, fault detection and diagnosis with limited physical in-situ sensors, and how they can be used to achieve unprecedentedly accurate process control.