Finite Element Analysis and a Model-Free Control of Tension and Speed for a Flexible Conveyor System

In today's life, there is a wide variety of conveyor structures, from large heavy load conveyor in modern mining industry to the conveyor belt with small and simple structure in magnetic tape. Since its structure is simple, reliable and easy to deploy, it has become one of the basic mechanical drive methods. But almost every drive system suffers from fatigue failure, particularly the conveyor belt itself. So how to analyze the stress in conveyor structure has became a problem, which is worthy to study.;This thesis has two goals. First, we analyze the stresses in the conveyor belt system to determine the maximum stresses in the belt to ensure system safety during its operation. We build a 3D model of the system in Solidworks CAD system. Then we build a finite element model of the system using tetrahedral elements. We utilize nonlinear finite element analysis to calculate the stresses. The analysis considers the material nonlinearity due to the belt rubber material.;Second, we derive a control algorithm to allow us to control the belt stress and speed. We have used Simulink model of Matlab to build control a system. We utilize the Kelvin-Voigt model, the Maxwell model and the Dzierzek model in our simulation.;The results of both the computational finite element analysis and the control simulation compare well with closed-form solutions. The maximum stress from the finite element analysis is 16% off compared with the simple stress calculations. This is attributed to the fact that we modeled the entire conveyor belt system as assembly. The controller system results are within our expectations. The speed and stress in the belt meet our desired goal of keeping them constant via the control system.