Performance of a web transport system with tension control subsystem using speed as control input

In this paper, the authors improve the control performance of a multi-span web transport system by introducing a new decentralized control strategy using the overlapping decomposition. The system is composed of eleven guide rollers, four main sections mutually interconnected with each other. The overlapping decomposition requires a derivative action on the controlled variables. All the theoretical aspects will be shown together with the preliminary experimental results demonstrating the improvements of the proposed approach.