• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.3-9
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• 2009

When washing machine is rotated in the laundry, it tends to lean toward one side. This tendency causes a serious vibration. The balance of washing machine plays an important role in order to reduce the vibration by injecting the sand or the salt water into the balance of washing machine. The hot plate welder is used to prevent from outflow of contents. The hot plate welder brings about many problems which is concerned with accidents. The direction recognition and location information of the balance are required in this system. In this paper, the recognition direction of balance in washing machine using machine vision system is studied. The template matching algorithm compares sub-image with original image acquired in real-time to obtain a center point of balance image. The mid points and the edges of balance are estimated by the edge detection and gauging algorithms. The data acquired by these results is used for recognition direction of balance. The automation software for image processing is developed by using LabVIEW.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1997.04a
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• pp.602-607
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• 1997

Ball balance belong to a kind of automatic balancers opten referred to as direct balancer or passive mass systems. In such systems the balancing is achieved with free masses. One of the most prevalent problems encountered in washing is the vibration during spin cycle. The primary cause of this vibration is mass unbalance associated with non unform distribution of clothes. Front loading type machine of European style, especially, has inherent unbalance mass due to its shape and this then makes the vibration worse than top loading type machine, which is more popular in Korea. Since the mass distribution of cloths is random and can not be predicted in advance, direct automatic balances appear to be the only feasible alternative. The results form computer simulation and experimental testing will be presented together with stability implications.