In addition, the existing challenges and the need for
action are shown. The selected test-setup is
presented in the third chapter. Subsequently,
performed experiments are explained and
consecutively evaluated. The last chapter completes
the publication with a summary and description of
the conclusions.
2 STATE OF THE ART
Control of process forces provides significant
economic benefits for many use cases by increasing
operation productivity and improving part quality.
Especially for processes in the field of machining
technology, targeted influencing of the process
forces is of outstanding importance (Ulsoy and
Koren, 1993). For this reason, a large number of
concepts and algorithms for control of process forces
have been investigated and developed both in
research and industry.
First significant ideas associated with process
control systems were introduced in the 1960’s
(Ulsoy and Koren, 1989). An early work
investigated a PID-structure with fixed gain
controller as approach. But it turned out that fixed-
gain controllers could not maintain system
performance and stability in machining force control
(Koren and Masory, 1981). That lead to an
increasing interest in the development of adaptive
machining force controllers. The majority of the
work in machining force control is devoted to the
subject of adaptive techniques. An overview to the
developments in adaptive control systems is given in
(Ulsoy et al., 1983). (Liu et al.; 2001) compares
different adaptive control techniques. However,
adaptive controllers can be difficult to develop,
analyze, implement, and maintain due to their
inherent complexity. Consequently, adaptive
machining force controllers have found little
application in industry (Landers et al., 2004).
In recent years, approaches with fuzzy logic
controllers have been increasingly investigated
(Zuperl et al., 2005), (Xu and Shin, 2008), (Kim and
Jeon, 2011). Artificial neural networks also came
into focus of considerations increasingly (Haber and
Alique, 2004), (Yao et al., 2013). Even a novel
approach using predictive algorithms was recently
presented in (Stemmmler et al., 2017). But these
concepts were also unable to establish themselves in
industry.
A key problem is that complex control structures
and algorithms are difficult to integrate in machine
tools with conventional industrial control.
Additional hardware usually has to be used. The
resulting communication times in turn reduce
performance and reaction speed is limited. Direct
access to the control level (e.g. the interpolation
cycle) is necessary to ensure real-time capability. In
this context, measuring the process forces with
additional sensors is also problematic. The cycle
time is increased even further through signal
processing and integration into the control system.
This becomes clear in (Posdzich et al., 2019) for
example. The system is superimposed to the control
and the entire measuring chain has a sampling time
of approximately 40 ms. The control can only react
to a limited extent to quickly acting disturbance
forces.
High-resolution measurement inputs are
particularly relevant for force control, besides real-
time capability. The configuration of the load cell
with strain gauges is based on maximum loads. As a
result, only a small part of the total area remains for
the force actually occurring in the process with
12-bit converters. Therefore higher resolutions
(16-24 bit) are necessary.
Industrial control manufacturers have made
significant progress in these areas. The control
components and assemblies from Beckhoff meet
these requirements and offer new opportunities. The
corresponding experimental test-setup for an
electromechanical axis is presented in the next
chapter. Here, the implementation options of direct
force control are considered and examined with
regard to their limits and performance.
With regard to the design of a force control on
electromechanical feed axes, no generally applicable
regulations are known yet. Accordingly, no auto-
tuning functionalities are available on the control
side. Since no automatism or reproducible procedure
can be applied, the usual practice of manual
parameterization is used first. In addition, various
setting rules are examined with regard to their
suitability.
3 TEST-SETUP
For the experiments, a test-setup of an
electromechanical feed axis was selected, which is
designed for loads up to 10 kN. The mechanical
construction and control engineering structure are
described below. The commissioning and
enhancement with a force control are elucidated, too.