Motion Control of Liquid Containers with Slosh Constraints during High-Speed Three-Dimensional Transfer

Abstract

In many plants, there exist a lot of liquid transfer systems. The acceleration during transfer causes sloshing (liquid vibration) in the container, which can lead to overflow and changes in properties, requiring transfer that suppresses sloshing. However, transfer without sloshing requires many sensors and complicated models for control design. Moreover, previous sloshing suppression has been used for horizontal transferring, but flexible transferring in a production line is needed to enable high-mix low-volume production. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to suppress sloshing when liquid containers are transferred along a three-dimensional path. To cope with changes in the natural angular frequency of the liquid surface due to vertical acceleration, a time-varying notch filter is designed and combined with a low-pass filter to suppress sloshing. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by conducting sloshing suppression experiments in a petri dish, which easily overflows.