Feedforward control of the lateral position of a moving web using system identification

Many mathematical models have been developed to describe the lateral dynamics of a moving web, including Shelton's model. Experimental results in this study showed that the existing model does not fully describe the characteristic of the lateral dynamics for some typical operating conditions. An experimental model was derived by means of system identification using a well-known least-square method to improve the prediction capability of the lateral dynamics. A commercial guidance system usually has the proportional and integral control structure. Sometimes it may not eliminate the effect of periodic lateral disturbances efficiently which are transferred from upstream spans because the controller relying solely on feedback generates control action only when an output measurement signal differs from a reference value. However, if the disturbance is deterministic, a feedforward control structure may offer simple and effective disturbance rejection performance. In this paper, the lateral position of a web at the upstream span and the identified model of lateral dynamics for the span were used to estimate the effect of disturbance on the lateral dynamics of a moving web at the exit span of the guidance system. A feedforward controller was designed to reject the deterministic disturbance of lateral dynamics of a moving web. The disturbance rejection performance of the proposed controller was verified by computer simulation and experiments. These results showed that the proposed feedforward scheme with an improved mathematical model greatly improved control performance in overcoming the dynamic disturbance.