Uniform tension and speed control for roll-to-roll manufacturing process

Roll-to-roll processing is a low cost and high throughput method for manufacturing of printed electronics such as flexible displays and smart labels. Control of web tension and speed is very important in roll-to-roll manufacturing to ensure high yield of printed electronics. The objective of this final year project is to develop a FPGA based roll-to-roll manufacturing system control program through LabVIEW. The tension and velocity control performance of this program is tested on an experimental roll-to-roll manufacturing system in SIMTech. In the first part of this project, a tension controller is designed and verified through simulation. The tension controller is a modified version of typical industrial cascade PI controller. It has a smaller overshoot and a better adaptability to system change compared to the original tension controller. Besides feedback control, feedforward control is also applied to improve the tension control performance. Feedforward control can eliminate periodic disturbance effectively. After the controller is designed, it is implemented in FPGA through LabVIEW. The control program provides separate tuning panel for each controller. It also provides real-time monitoring of roll-to-roll processing and both manual control and automation of the manufacturing process. Web velocity and tension control performance of the automated manufacturing process is shown in the report. The objective of this final year project is achieved. The limitation of this control program is discussed and recommendation is given for future development to further improve tension and velocity uniformity.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering