Implementation of an Active Wire Tensioner Using a Cascade Fuzzy Logical Controller for a Brush-Less Direct Current Coil Winding Machine

Abstract

This paper is to implement an active wire tensioner which uses a cascade fuzzy logical controller to handle wire tension on a brush-less direct current (BLDC) coil winding machine during the winding process. A manifold winding process of the BLDC machine found by an analysis among various winding processes shows that the wire tension in winding process of the BLDC winding machine is more fluctuated than that in other winding processes. Based on the result of the analysis, a mechanism called as a wire accumulator using a pneumatic servo system is designed to decay the vibration of wire tension encountered with the harsh condition of winding process. In order to ensure the wire accumulator working properly, a magnetic powder clutch is adopted to prevent the wire passing through the wire accumulator freely. The active wire tensioner is defined as a multi-input single-output system with two control inputs for driving the magnetic powder clutch/the pneumatic cylinder and single output as the wire tension force. For such sophisticated behavior of the system’s response, a novel cascade fuzzy logical controller (CC-FLC) with the fuzzy rule constructed based on a split-range method is appropriate for controlling the active wire tensioner. Additionally, the CC-FLC is convenient to be built into DSP alone-chip since its processing calculation consumes a low time. The effectiveness of the proposed active wire tensioner using CC-FLC is compared to that of a passive wire tensioner existing on the BLDC winding machine when both wire tensioners are used for coil producing process of the BLDC winding machine. Experimental results show that the BLDC winding machine equipped with the proposed active wire tensioner can operate at high winding speed without breaking the wire and reducing the coil size in the view of dimension.