Design Of Air-jet Loom Control System Based On EtherMAC

With the popularity of shuttleless looms, air jet looms get more attention from textile industry because of its clean weft media, high speed, etc. At present, the gap between domestic air jet loom control system and foreign advanced control systems still exists, especially in the aspects of network supports for workshop and weft insertl/On system performance.In response to above-mentioned problems, this paper designs a air jet loom control system which based on the EtherMAC(Ethernet for Manufacture Automation Control). The control system consists of master computers and slave computers, they communicate with each other through the EtherMAC. The main functions of master computer are human-computer interaction, parameter configuration, communication and so on. The slave machine includes motor control module, I/O module, dobby module and weft insertion subsystem.As the weft insertion subsystem demands highest requirements for response time, we design the high-speed EtherMAC to do synchronous control. In order to ensure the weft insertion motion meets the requirements of control system for rapid response, the high-speed EtherMAC selects the external event trigger mode to synchronize the nodes. After deciding the mode, We redesign the structure of traditional EtherMAC IP Core to change its trigger mode from inner to external event.This paper introduces the weft insertion subsystem implementations which based on the SOPC technology. Through the development process, we optimize each module as much as possible to adapt the higher speed of loom on the premise of weft insertion control accuracy. We also present the integral structure of host computers’ software and give a brief description to the HMI module, communication service module and remote monitoring interaction module implementations.Finally, this paper makes a functional test and industrial field certification to the air jet loom control system. We design a timing module working in the laboratory environment, and use SignalTap Ⅱ testing and analyzing the cost time of each control process in the weft insertion subsystem. With the help of the testing data, this control system passes the industrial field validation after continuous improvements.The control system mentioned in this paper is based on the EtherMAC, and because of its modular design, it is flexible and scalable. The master computer can achieve workshop network via LAN. The weft insertion subsystem can support spindle speed up to 1855r/min and node count to 256,which has reached the international advanced level.