Slosh-Free Positioning of Containers with Liquids and Flexible Conveyor Belt

This paper describes a method for slosh-free moving of containers with a liquid at which the conveyor belt is flexible. It shows, by means of experimental results, that a container filled with a liquid can be regarded as a damped pendulum. Upon parameter identification of the two single-mode subsystems, theoretical modelling of the complete system is described. With respect to industrial application, feedforward control is used to transfer the container in horizontal direction without sloshing. The applied method requires deterministic and hard real time communication between the PLC and the servo amplifier which is realized here with Ethernet POWERLINK. The principle structure, calculations, time duration and the robustness of the basic types of input shaper are described and compared with each other. Additionally the positioning results of the two-mode system are presented. Finally, a possibility of the principle software implementation is presented.