Design of PSO-Based PI controller for tension control in web transport systems

Abstract

Web transport systems (WTS) are widely employed in industries to transport materials as a long sheet (web) from one section to another. Maintaining web tension along the transit is imperative as it accounts for material integrity and quality. Hence, an efficient web tension controller is needed to provide performance optimization and reduced production down time. Conventional controllers such as PI controllers have several shortcomings, such as performance distortion in noisy environment, inability to handle interactions among the process variables and lack of optimality. This investigation presents an offline optimization-based PI controller tuned using particle swarm optimization (PSO) for WTS to control the web tension. Simulation studies indicate that the proposed controller strategy exhibits good performance optimization by maintaining constant web tension without violating physical constraints.