Design of a Weigh Feeder Control System for Reduced Energy Consumption

In the present paper, we discuss a design method for controlling a weigh feeder that has been widely used in industry. Since a control system is designed using a performance-adaptive method, the control parameters are adaptively updated based on user-specified control performance. In conventional performance-adaptive methods, control systems are designed such that the variance of the control error is less than or equal to a specified value and the variance of the differences in the control input is minimized without changing the acceptable variance value of the control error. On the other hand, since the design objective of the present study is to reduce energy consumption, the variance of the differences in the control input is first set, and then the variance of the control error is minimized without changing the acceptable variance value of the differences in the control input. Consequently, the variation of the control input can be substantially reduced. In the proposed method, a proportional-integral controller is designed based on generalized minimum variance control (GMVC) with steady-state predictive output (GMVCS). One of the design parameters in GMVCS is automatically decided such that a desired control performance can be attained, and the PI parameters of a PI control law are calculated based on a GMVCS law.