Long primary linear drive for material handling

For material processing and transportation in industrial production lines, a segmented long primary linear drive with several passive vehicles is designed and experimentally evaluated. This paper concentrates on hard- and software for power electronics and motion control of the proposed system. Each segment of the track is fed by a dedicated power stack and control information is exchanged between all power stacks and all vehicle controllers via an inverter-bus. The control for sensor based and sensorless sections of the track is discussed.