Advanced control applications in marble machines

Since fossil energy resources in the Earth are being consuming fast, energy resources are needed to be used efficiently. Therefore, to ensure energy efficiency is vital issue for energy consumption which is the main cost item in marble cutting process.Though, there are various machines for processing the marble in mine industry, circular sawblade machines are widely deploying for producing plaques from block marbles in particular. There exists many parameters with related to machine, marble, and sawblade which those are affecting of productivity in the cutting process. In the cutting process, travelling and sawblade rotation speeds are the most important parameters. Choosing these parameters correctly improves energy efficiency. Since marble is a metamorphic rock, it is not a homogenous material and its intensity may vary. So, selection of parameters prior to cutting process and remaining of them constant to the end of the process reduce energy efficiency of the marble cutting process. If parameters are controlled according to the parameters such as intensity of cut region and hardness of the material, it is clear that energy efficiency will improve. It is possible to control the travelling and the sawblade rotation speed with a controller embedded in closed loop control system. The controller will continuously augment cutting parameters to save energy by selecting most appropriate parameters according to varying hardness marble regions.In this thesis, a laboratory scaled cutting machine with circular sawblade which has LabVIEW based data acquisition system was designed. PID and FL controllers were designed for controlling the travel and sawblade rotation speeds in the machine. Totally four controllers (Three of them for controlling the travel speed and one for controlling the travel and sawblade rotation speeds simultaneously) were embedded in graphical user interface designed with LabVIEW. Burdur beige marble, Usak green marble and Afyon travertine were used to examine the performances of designed controllers for cutting experiments. Results obtained from cutting experiments were analyzed for specific cutting energy, cutting period, absolute total error and energy saving values. The results showed that FL controllers are more successful than PID controllers. In addition, it was seen that FL controller which have two control signals had been more performance than FL controllers which have one control signal.