Abstract

Electromechanical linear axes are used as actuators in many areas of industrial automation. Such axes are a fundamental building block of any machine tool, manipulator or similar device, whether they implement only one- or multi-axis positioning. Usually, servomotors or stepper motors are used to drive the axes, and the control is performed by a variety of PLC controllers and controller con cepts. The paper presents the implementation of a multi-purpose electromechanical linear axis, which enables the study, research and comparison of various linear drive concepts and types of closed loop controllers. The linear axis incorporates two different motor types: a BLDC servomotor as well as a stepper electric motor, and thus also enables comparison of these two motor types and corresponding control concepts. A multi-core Beckhoff soft PLC is used as a controller, which can implement either built-in closed loop controllers or can also implement controllers designed in the Matlab/Simulink environment.
PID closed loop position controller built-in Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 is presented in the paper. Further on, it is compared by PID closed loop controller developed in Matlab/Simulink which was exported and imported into Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 environment in order to confirm the adequacy of importing and using Matlab/Simulink controllers on Beckhoff soft PLCs.