Abstract
This paper presents a nonlinear register control scheme for the latest type of rotogravure printing presses, referred to as the sectional drive system. In printing presses where each gravure cylinder is driven by an individual motor, tension fluctuations caused by an upstream register control generate register errors in downstream units. Therefore, development of a control system to reduce downstream register error propagation is a challenging issue for the printing presses. First, we propose a nonlinear coordinate transformation for the state variables in order to deal with the printing press dynamics easily. Then, based on the new coordinates, a nonlinear control law is designed with the Lyapunov stability theorem such that the register errors converge to zero. Finally. the performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation and experiments carried out on a practical printing press, and a comparison with a conventional control method is also presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. ยฉ 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 94(1): 17โ24, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10282