Temperature Control of Injection Molding Machine using PI Controller with Input Restriction

Injection molding is the most common method of shaping plastic resins for manufacturing a variety of parts. This injection molding is accomplished by injection molding machines (IMM) which consists of a hewer, a reciprocating screw, barrel assembly, and an injection nozzle. The plastic resin is fed to the machine through the hopper and it should be heated to the target melting temperature, which depends on material properties, as closely as possible with very small temperature overshoot in the barrel. Since the barrel, which has temperature dependent specific heat and thermal conductivity in the operating temperature range, is heated by the several electric heater bands, it is not an easy task to control the temperature of the barrel owing to the interference of neighboring heaters and its material properties. Though PID controller with auto-tuning capability is widely adopted in the nm, the auto-tuning process should be carried out whenever the operating temperature is changed significantly. Recently, though the predictive controller is developed and shows good performance, it has drawbacks: 1. Since the heat transfer modeling process is very complicated and should be carried out again when the barrel is changed, it is somewhat inappropriate in the field. 2. The controller performance is not validated in whole operating temperature range. In this paper, cascade type simple PI controller with input restriction is proposed to find the possibility of controlling the barrel temperature in the whole operating temperature range. It is shown by experiment that the proposed controller shows good performance. This result can be applied to design of PI controller with auto-tuning capability.

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