Design and development of a ball-screw and electrical motor driven industrial electromechanical cyli

Abstract

Keywords: Electrical Ball-Screw Driven Industrial Cylinder Mechanism (BSDICM); Efficiency; Position Root Mean Square Error (PRMSE); Electromechanical Cylinder; Industrial Pneumatic Cylinder

Introduction

An actuator is defined as a device that converts energy into motion and produces essentially rotational and linear motion [1]. Linear actuators are used in places where linear motion is required and are known for a wide range of applications in various industries including materials handling [2], military [3], agriculture, machine tools [4, 5], and industrial machinery. Linear actuators are generally divided

into three main groups according to power sources, which can be selected as electric current, hydraulic fluid pressure, or pneumatic pressure. The pneumatic and hydraulic linear actuator include a simple piston inside a hollow cylinder [6]. External air compressor or the pump moves the piston inside the cylinder housing, and with this increasing pressure, the cylinder

*Corresponding author. *E-mail address: mohammad.fotuhi@keramik.com.tr This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by Regional Editor Osman Nuri Uçan Published by Yıldız Technical University Press, İstanbul, Turkey Copyright 2021, Yıldız Technical University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Sigma J Eng Nat Sci, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 822–830, December, 2022

moves along the piston axis, which generates the required linear force [7]. It returns to its original initial length by providing a spring force or another fluid to the opposite side of the piston [8]. However, many components are needed to operate the pneumatic system, such as buffer tanks, valves, regulators, etc. Hydraulic linear actuators are very similar to pneumatic actuators, but a non-compressible fluid must be used as opposed to compressed air in which the cylinder is moved in a linear motion. Electric actuators consist of a ball, roller screw, or belt connected via a coupler to an electric motor. When the screw rotates, it moves the piston and the piston is connected to a rod or a carrier that moves the load. These actuators have some advantages and disadvantages according to the requirements of the process in which they will be used. Medium and small-scale enterprises are switching to electrical actuators to expand their product portfolio by designing new products or converting existing pneumatic products. However, the switching to electric actuators is focused on achieving more precise and full-motion profile control (position, speed, acceleration/deceleration, and force) of electric actuators, as well as providing superior precision and repeatability and preventing vibration and noise in motion. While electric actuators are higher in performance and initial cost, studies have confirmed that the electric actuator solution makes it a more economical option than air cylinders over the life of the device or machine [9]. This reference shows that factors such as efficiency, electricity usage costs, air leakage, maintenance, product change, product quality, change time, and cycle times have been examined along with other factors that determine the total cost of ownership for a pneumatic actuator technology. Also, in terms of efficiency, it was found that only 23% 30% for pneumatic systems, 40% for hydraulic systems, and 80% for electrical systems [10]. By comparison with others, electric actuators require little or no maintenance. Some actuators may require relubrication from time to time, but often electric actuators do not demand regular maintenance. In electronic cylinder applications, the cylinder motion profile is designed by a user program. Therefore, the

cylinder profile is very easy to change and significantly reduces time. This subject is discussed in many research articles [11, 12, 13]. In this paper, the application of the ECDLSM was developed from the switching of the existing pneumatic cylinder. The main goal of such a system is to avoid the force overshoots in the contact stage while keeping stress force error in the high-sensitive tracking stage, where traditional pneumatic cylinders are not competent. The content flow of this paper is organized as follows: First, the modeling of electromechanical CDLSM is briefly introduced, and the mechanical design is presented, next, the simulation and experimental results are given and discussed in detail. Finally, the conclusions are summarized.

Modeling Of Electromechanical Cdlsm

The switched electric actuator consists of three units: motor unit, coupling unit, driver unit. A hybrid stepper motor with two-phase was used in the experimental study because it is advantageous in applications where rotation angle, speed, position, and synchronism need to be controlled. Stepper motors are used in many different applications [6, 7]. For the coupling unit, acme ball screw and nut system were preferred as the price is affordable and easy to find in small dimensions. The screw was integrated into the rotor of the stepper motor to prevent vibration during the acceleration and deceleration phases of the motion. The linear encoder attached to the moving piston and the rotary encoder attached to the stepper motor were used to validate the test system and to implement the control algorithm. A visual C ++ based program has been developed to enter motion profile and control signals using an industrial PC (Googoltech) with many analog/digital input/output ports. In order to analyse the linear force generated by the system, springs with three different stiffness coefficients were used. Using different speed and motion profiles, the force values produced by the system, the current value drawn by the motor, the maximum acceleration, speed and force values achieved at these speeds were determined. The diagram of the ECDLSM is illustrated in Figure.1. For the ECDLSM, a model was developed in [14, 15]. The

Sigma J Eng Nat Sci, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 822–830, December, 2022

mathematical model is based on two movements, the motor angle θ and the distance of load. The θ angle is linked by a ball screw mechanism to the d distance. According to the change of position, two forces are formed at the input and output of the system. a motor forces Fm applied at the input of the system and a load forces Fl applied at the output of the system.

Mechanical Design

To obtain a simple and cheap design, we minimized the amount of mechanical and electronic parts. It was therefore decided to use normal stepper motor and ball-screw. Also, electromechanical cylinder can be both opened and closed by only one HANPOSE 17HS3401S T8 × 8 nemastepper motor with a PK65N ball-screw driven by the stepper motor driver model CWD556. When a voltage of 24V is applied to the motor this results in a constant actuation torque of 0.5 Nm applied at the base of end effector and 0.25Nm on each of the opposite link as defined [16]. The torque general equation (1) was used to obtain the ball-screw dynamic equations. General force F was calculated by sum of two different forces; the torque caused by frictional forces fr and the torque of external forces applied to the shaft. T= β=

η is the efficiency, α is the thread angle for a standard bolt (30 degree) [17, 18]. The torque general equation (4) was used to obtain the ball-screw dynamic equations. The TBS is general torque term on the ball-screw use in equation (5).

Results And Discussion

There are several methods for analyzing and measuring force, three spring with different stiffness coefficient values (Table 1) has been used to analyze the dynamic behavior of the system [19]. To analyze the ECDLSM, two sensors used to measure data, sensors are incremental encoder of motor and load-linear encoder [20,21], motor incremental encoder gives a pulse output of 0.17578125 (degrees/ pulse), and load linear encoder gives a voltage output of 0.5 (mV/mm), over the range0-20 mm this is amplified by an amplifier with voltage gain of 20, sampled and applied to a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter with voltage range 0-5 V. resolution of the measurement is 1024 (Digital value/mm). The experimental setup of electrical ECDLSM is shown in Figure.3. The position and current analog signals are converted to physical parameters by using sensor gains (equation 6, 7, 8), they are given in Table 1.

Here, F is the Force along the direction of movement (see Figure .2), FA is the external force, θ is the tilt-angle (degree), Dp is the pitch circle diameter (9.5 mm), Dr is the root diameter of the screw shaft, PB is the screw pitch (5 mm), L is the lead of the thread (5 mm), ns is the number of starts (1), μ is the friction coefficient of sliding surface, μ0 is the internal friction coefficient of preload nut (0.15),

Here DL is the distance of load (mm), DM is the distance of linear movement of motor (mm), Cs is the equation of current sensing, VL is the digitized voltage from analog to digital using an ADC (analog to digital converter) value of voltage output of the load linear encoder (digital value), PM is the pulse number of the motor incremental encoder (pulse), VC is the discrete voltage (ADC value of voltage) output of the current sensor.

Sigma J Eng Nat Sci, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 822–830, December, 2022

Table 3-Velocity profile (Max of speed = 42 mm/s) Speed Mode

To avoid repetition of showing same behavior in the paper, the movement profile of a Cylinder A-type of the spring in the low-speed case is only illustrated in the Figure

4. The results of the medium, high and very high speed

of double-B and C types Springs of the springs for the ECDLSM are given also in Table 2. The velocity profile is shown in Table 3. According to Table 4, For the A-type spring, the maximal force of 106.4 N and the maximum linear movement of

Conclusion

In this paper, an experimental setup for the ECDLSM was designed and developed. In the experimental setup, the force was calculated based on the spring’s stiffness. The forces of the ECDLSM were analyzed using the position errors obtained from the load and stepper motor position. In order to evaluate the ECDLSM for different forces, three springs with different stiffness coefficient values were used for the force analysis. The RMSE between the position of the stepper motor and the position measured signal of the load was calculated for the position performance of the system. In the high-velocity case with A-type spring, the minimum RMSEs values were obtained as expected. The max force value (F=359 N) was obtained by the ball-screw mechanism and stepper motor. The results show that the A-type spring-cylinder performed better than the B and C-type spring-cylinder and the highest ratio of the force applied by the proposed RMF method is 89.51% at 3.78 mm/s. This prototype of the ECDLSM developed here can be enhanced using the stepper motor with high power and high position accuracy. In this way, the position errors that occurred here may be eliminated very easily.

Declaration Of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability Statement

The authors confirm that the data that supports the findings of this study are available within the article. Raw

Sigma J Eng Nat Sci, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 822–830, December, 2022

data that support the finding of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Conflict Of Interest

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics

There are no ethical issues with the publication of this manuscript.

References

1. Zhou HX, Zhou CG, Feng HT, Ou Y. Theoretical and based gripper control on a robotic arm. 2016 IEEE experimental analysis of the preload degradation of 20th Jubilee International Conference on Intelligent double-nut ball screws. Precis Eng 2020;65:72–90. Engineering Systems (INES); 2016 June 30-Jul [CrossRef] 2; Budapest, Hungary: IEEE; 2016. pp. 107–112.
2. Hagen D, Pawlus W, Ebbesen MK, Andersen TO. [CrossRef] Feasibility study of electromechanical cylinder [15] Liu Y, Zhang Y, Xu Q. Design and control of a drivetrain for offshore mechatronic systems. Model novel compliant constant-force gripper based on Identif Control 2017;38:59–77. [CrossRef] buckled fixed-guided beams. IEEE/ASME Trans
3. Rouhi M, Ghayoor H, Fortin-Simpson J, Zacchia Mechatron 2017;22:476–486. [CrossRef] TT, Hoa SV, Hojjati M. Design, manufacturing, and [16] Xu F, Wang B, Shen J, Hu J, Jiang G. Design and testing of a variable stiffness composite cylinder. realization of the claw gripper system of a climbing Compos Struct 2018;184:146–152. [CrossRef] robot. J Intell Robot Syst 2018;89:301–317. [CrossRef]
4. Liu Y, Gao X, Yang X. Research of control strategy in the large electric cylinder position servo system. C. Design and development of a soft robotic grip- Math Probl Eng 2015:1–6. [CrossRef] per for manipulation in minimally invasive surgery:
5. Li X, Chen W, Lin W, Low KH. A variable stiffness a proof of concept. Meccanica 2015;50:2855–2863. robotic gripper based on structure-controlled prin- [CrossRef] ciple. IEEE Trans Autom Sci Eng 2017;15:1104– [18] Hagen D, Padovani D, Choux M. Guidelines to select 1113. [CrossRef] between self-contained electro-hydraulic and electro-
6. Thöndel E. Linear electromechanical actuator mechanical cylinders. 2020 15th IEEE Conference as a replacement of hydraulic cylinder for elec- on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA); tric motion platform for use in simulators. In: 2020 Nov 09-13; Kristiansand,Norway: IEEE; 2016. Mastorakis NE, editor. Recent researches in applied pp.547–554. [CrossRef] informatics : Proceedings of the 2nd International [19] Fotuhi MJ, Yılmaz O, Bingul Z. Human postural conference on Applied Informatics and Computing ankle torque control model during standing pos- Theory (AICT’11); 2011 Sept 26-28; Prague, ture with a series elastic muscle-tendon actuator. SN Czech Republic: WSEAS; 2011. pp. 290–295. Appl Sci 2020;2:1–8. [CrossRef]
7. Kumar R, Mehta U, Chand P. A low cost linear force feedback control system for a two-fingered paral- torque control of an non-linear friction inverted lel configuration gripper. Procedia Comput Sci pendulum driven with a rotary series elastic actua- 2017;105:264–269. [CrossRef] tor. In: Ozseven T, Yasar E, editors. 3rd International
8. Martin GE. On the theory of segmented electrome- Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and chanical systems. J Acoust Soc Am 1964;36:1366– Innovative Technologies (ISMSIT); 2019 Oct 11-13; 1370. [CrossRef] Ankara,Turkiye: IEEE; 2019. [CrossRef]
9. Datta R, Pradhan S, Bhattacharya B. Analysis and design optimization of a robotic gripper using mul- ball screw feed drives. Prod Eng 2012;6:205–211. [CrossRef] tiobjective genetic algorithm. IEEE Trans Syst Man
10. Li Q, Qin Q, Zhang S, Deng H. (2011) Optimal Cybern Syst 2015;46:16–26. [CrossRef] design for heavy forging robot grippers. Appl Mech Mater 2011;44-47:743–747. [CrossRef] 830 Sigma J Eng Nat Sci, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 822–830, December, 2022
11. Vicente DA, Hecker RL, Villegas FJ, Flores GM. Modeling and vibration mode analysis of a ball screw drives: low-order modeling and experi- screw drive. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 2012;58:257– ments. J Dyn Sys Meas Control 2004;126:388–396. [CrossRef]
12. Wilkinson LJ, Summer MD, Rust JB, Bosscher PM. High-force robotic gripper. U.S. Patent 8,534,729. for industrial grippers. Mechatronics 1992;2:239– Florida: Harris Corporation; 2013. 255. [CrossRef]
13. Chen CL, Jang MJ, Lin KC. Modeling and high- precision control of a ball-screw-driven stage. Precis sal value for ball screw feed drives. Precis Eng Eng 2004;28:483–495. 2019;60:116–120. [CrossRef]

Share and Cite