Modeling and register control of sectional drive gravure printing press

Abstract

In this paper, a method of modeling and control of a printing press is considered. In the recent standard gravure printing press called "sectional drive" with multi units, register control causes register errors in the downstream units. The problem is not only the increase of the number of defections but also the complexity of adjusting procedure of controller parameters. Because of this, it is needed to introduce a new control system to shorten the total settling time. For this purpose, in this paper, a mathematical model of the sectional drive gravure printing press is proposed, and then, a cooperative control method using feedforward is designed in consideration of the relation between units. It turned out that this control system makes the total settling time short, and furthermore, using the mathematical model, the simulation based design method is established, which also shorten the time period of control system design procedure. The paper also presents some experimental results to show the validity of proposed mathematical model and control system.