• Organisation

Nowadays, linear motors are widely used in machine tools to eliminate the gear re-lated problems of rotative drives with lead-screw transmission. With linear motors the performance increases considerably since mechanical transmission elements are re-moved. This leads to a better precision, a higher acceleration and a higher speed of the moving part. Therefore, direct drives with linear motors are increasingly used in indus-trial applications although these solutions often need higher investment costs. In industrial processing plants, raw materials are transferred into the production process, typically then they pass several processing stations and finally, the processed article is removed from the processing chain. In today’s production plants, different equipment is used for transportation and processing materials. Advantages can be ex-pected by using the same system of linear drives for transportation as well as for proc-essing materials. Hence, this dissertation discusses a proposal for process-integrated material handling based on linear drives. The integration of linear drives into the pro-duction plant calls for a new view of the production process. The integrative viewpoint where a co-design of drive and plant is introduced should be developed for future appli-cations. To fulfill the demand of a material handling system, two alternatives are compared. The first one is based on active vehicles and passive tracks and the second one is based in passive vehicles and active tracks. Advantages and disadvantages of both alternatives are discussed, considering aspects of the power supply system as well as control and communication demands. The control of Long Stator PM Linear Synchronous motors with passive, lightweight transportation units is investigated in detail. Hard- and software for an experimental setup is developed for a sectioned Long Stator Linear Motor and used to validate the proposed system. Finite Element tools are applied to introduce information into the con-trol loop about section’s transition and thrust force ripple. Field oriented control, direct flux control and resonant control are supported by the Finite Element information to suppress detent forces and achieve a smooth movement overall the track. A control method for soft transition between separately fed sections of the track without affecting the dynamic are implemented. Experimental results validate the proposed system and it opens a new application area for the linear drives in future.