Research And Application Of Control System For Spray Forming Equipment

Spray forming is an advanced specific casting technology which uses fast solidification way to obtain metal billets. This paper mainly focuses on the research and application development of the control system of the spray forming devices and equipments, and its main goal is real time supervisory control and data acquisition of the spray forming process.First, the appearance and evolution of the spray forming technology are introduced, the process characters and equipments are described and the general control requirements are given. Then the hardware and software makeup of the control system is introduced, its main frame is monitoring computer and PLC, with the configuration software WinCC and PLC programming software STEP7. The design method and detailed development way of the control system software are provided. For the key problems such as temperature control and spray height control, according to characters of themselves, detailed control strategies and commissioning way are offered. A PID and a fuzzy control algorithm are separately used for the melting process and the temperature holding process, and at the same time, a closed loop control method is adopted for the spray height control. Finally, the influences of various parameters in spray process such as the nozzle's position and the withdrawal rate of the substrate on the shape evolution of the billet are analyzed by simulation.