PLC based speed control of DC belt conveyor system

Abstract

Conveyor belt system is one of the most common transfer system used in industry to transfer goods from one point to another in a limited distance. It is used in industries like the electro-mechanical/mechanical assembly manufacturing to transfer work piece from one station to another or one process to another in food industries. Belt conveyor system is also used in coal mining industries but a number of conveyor modules needs to be attached together to achieve long distance transfer. The belt conveyor system used in this project is driven by a DC motor and the model of the system will be determined using fundamental laws. The parameter of the model will then be estimated offline using System Identification toolbox in Matlab. For this reason, an open loop experiment will be done by injecting Sine Wave signal to the DC motor driver to obtain the experimental data for estimation process. This model is then used in Matlab for simulation purpose. In this project, two controllers will be designed. The PID controllers will be designed to provide comparison to the main controller which is the Adaptive Fuzzy PID controller. Both controllers will be simulated in Matlab’s environment and will also be implemented on real hardware where the algorithm will be written in PLC using SCL language. Both simulation and experimental results shows that Adaptive Fuzzy PID controller performs better and adapted to the changes in load much faster than the PID controller. This project has also proved that PLC is capable of performing high level control system tasks.