Application of Active Disturbance Rejection Control to a reel-to-reel system seen in tire industry

In this paper an Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) scheme is used to solve a sag control problem that has been noticed in tire production process. Constant length of the rubber sag is crucial in order to achieve high quality of tire reinforcement, which has its direct impact on driver safety. The ADRC method was compared in this research with other model-independent controller, i.e. Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID), widely used in engineering practice. Both of the techniques were implemented and experimentally verified on a model of tire reinforcement production stage that can be described with a reel-to-reel system (R2R). The effect of various radius in the rubber winding phase makes the R2R a nonstationary dynamic plant. The ADRC approach resulted in better performance both energetically and for tracking a square trajectory, even with the presence of artificially added external disturbance. Additional perturbation imitated unpredictable and surprisingly often phenomena, which are results of incidents that happen in other stages of the manufacturing process. The acquired results have potential importance to the tire industry.