As the technologies of electronic device have advanced these days, most of mechanical systems are designed with electronic control unit to take advantage of control parameter adaption to operating conditions and firmware flexibilities as well. On-board diagnosis, which detects the system malfunction and identifies potential source of error with its own diagnostic criteria, and fail-safe that can switch the mode of operation in view of recognized error characteristics enables easy maintenance and troubleshooting as well as system protection. This paper dealt with the development of diagnosis and fail-safe function for proportional flow control valve. All type of errors related to valve control system components are investigated and assigned to a specific hexadecimal codes. Cumulative error detection algorithm is applied in order for the sensitivity and reliability to be appropriate. Embedded simulator which runs simultaneously with system program provides the virtual error simulation environment for expeditious development of error detection algorithm. The diagnosis function was verified both with solenoid valve and embedded simulator test and it will enhance the valve control system monitoring function.

In the present study, a robust controller has been designed to control force for a pneumatic driving system considering the effect of a transmission line. Transfer characteristics of pneumatic transmission line should be changed according to the velocity of the air going through the transmission line. The designed controller is composed of two parts. The one is a feedback controller, which is composed of a stabilizing filter, a compensating filter of modelling error and a nominal model of the force control system, to compensate the influence of transmission line and improve the feedback characteristics of the control system, and, the other is a feedforward controller to achieve the control performance. Control results with the designed controller show that the robustness and performance of the control system are improved compared to the control results with a fixed gain controller.

This study aims at aligning multiple wafers to reduce wafer handling time in wafer processes. We designed a multilevel structure for a prealigner which can handle multiple wafer simultaneously in a system. The system consists of gripping parts, kinematic parts, vacuum chucks, pneumatic units, hall sensors and a DSP controller. Aligning procedure has two steps: mechanical gripping and notch finding. In the first step, a wafer is aligned in XY directions using 4-point mechanical contact. The rotational error can be found by detecting a signal in a notch using hall sensors. A dual prealigner was designed for 300mm wafers and constructed for a performance test. The accuracy was monitored by checking the movement of a notch in a machine vision. The result shows that the dual prealigner has enough performance as commercial products.

Nonlinear seal friction in pneumatic cylinders can impede the performance of pneumatic systems designed for high precision positioning with favorable high speed actuation. The behaviour of an elastomeric piston seals in high speed pneumatic cylinders is analyzed by nonlinear finite element analysis using ABAQUS. The contact pressures, stress and strain distributions and frictional forces of the squeeze type piston seal are simulated with variation of the seal radial installed interference, the operating pressures, friction coefficients and piston rod velocities. The nonlinear finite element model of the squeeze type piston seal is used to predict deformation of a seal, friction force and contact pressure distributions.