Abstract
In this paper, we proposed a new shaft distortion correction system having an adaptive PID controller using displacement sensors, which is adaptively reflecting variations of shaft strength owing to irregular heat treatment during an annealing process and sensitivity to the seasonal temperature changes. Generally, the shafts are annealed by heat treatment in order to enlarge the strength of the shaft, which causes an distortion of a shaft such as irregular bending of the shaft. In order to correct such a distortion of the shaft, a mechanical pressure is properly impacted to the distorted shaft. However, the strength of every shaft is different from each other owing to irregular annealing and seasonal temperature changes. Especially, the strength of a thin shaft such as a car transmission shaft is much more sensitive than that of a thick shaft. Therefore, it is very important for considering the strength of each shaft during correction of the car transmission shaft distortion in order to generate proper mechanical pressure. The conventional PID controller for the shaft distortion correction system does not consider each different strength of each shaft, which causes low productivity. Therefore, we proposed a new PID controller considering variations of shaft strength caused by seasonal temperature changes as well as irregular heat treatment and different cooling time. Three displacement sensors are used to measure a degree of distortion of the shaft at three different location. The proposed PID controller generates adaptively different coefficients according to different strength of each shaft using appropriately obtained pressure times from long-term experiments. Consequently, the proposed shaft distortion correction system increases the productivity about 30 % more than the conventional correction system in the real factory.