Non-model-based control for an industrial weigh belt feeder

An industrial weigh belt feeder is used to transport solid materials into a manufacturing process at a constant feedrate. It exhibits nonlinear behavior because of motor friction, saturation, and quantization noise in the measurement sensors. Three different non-model-based approaches (i.e., unfalsified PI control, fuzzy PI control and indirect self-tuning adaptive control) to automated controller tuning were developed and implemented for the weigh belt feeder. In this paper, each approach is briefly described and a detailed comparison of the three approaches in the areas of on-line computational effort, controller development effort, transient performance and the ability to handle motor saturation is given.