Application of embedded soft PLC in the control system of rapier loom

PLoS One. 2021 Sep 23;16(9):e0257629. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257629. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

At present, the rapier loom has gradually become the mainstream equipment in the manufacturing industry. In order to make the rapier loom realize automated production and further improve the production efficiency of the rapier loom, improve the programmability of the system, and reduce the cost of system maintenance. The thesis developed a rapier loom control system based on embedded soft PLC, and carried out experiments and applications in the field. The contribution and innovation of this paper is to develop a complete low-cost control system, and through a genetic algorithm optimized PID algorithm to complete the more effective control of the loom tension system. The embedded soft PLC system proposed in this paper reduces the overall maintenance cost of the system and improves the programmability of the system. This text carries on the systematic scheme design to the embedded soft PLC from the hardware system and the software system respectively. First, according to the actual requirements, this article designs the overall scheme of the embedded software PLC hardware system with STM32F407ZGT6 as the core. Then this article is based on the embedded soft PLC hardware platform, according to the international standard of industrial control programming, writes the embedded soft PLC low-level driver software. Secondly, this article analyzes the factors that affect the warp tension during the operation of the rapier loom, and proposes the use of genetic algorithm to optimize the warp tension control method of the traditional PID algorithm. Finally, we conducted verification tests and on-site application debugging for the entire set of rapier loom embedded soft PLC control system. We controlled the warp tension as the main experimental object. The results show that this control system effectively improves the control accuracy of the warp tension of the rapier loom and meets the actual needs of industrial applications. The whole system has a good application prospect in the warp tension control of rapier looms.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Industry
  • Software*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Jiangsu Province training fund funded project (Grant No. BRA2020244). This funded project is used to support the research on the intelligent control system of the rapier loom. This project is presided over by Xiao Yanjun. The Career Leader Intelligent Control Automation Company provided an experimental platform for this project. Career Leader intelligent control automation company provided support in the form of salaries for author Yanjun Xiao, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘Author contributions’ section.