Design of liquid container transport control system with overhead traveling crane

Abstract

In the steel/casting industries, a liquid container transport is carried out by an overhead traveling crane or a trolley. The operation of the overhead traveling crane is carried out both operation by the experience operator and operation by automated transportation in order to prevent quality deterioration due to the overflow and involvement in a hostile environment. In particular, the overhead crane transportation by the operator, which is allowed to select freely pathway, is needed from the point of freedoms of the operation. This paper presents a design of a liquid container transport control system with an overhead traveling crane, which is allowed to operate by an inexperienced operator easily. The presented control system is designed as to suppress both the rod vibration and the sloshing (liquid vibration) without measuring the sloshing. The presented control system is two DOFs controller, the feed-forward controller is based on two notch filter, and the feedback controller is based on the H₂/H_∞ controller design method using LMI. The derived controller is performed a controller order reduction in consideration with practical use. Some experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed design of control system.