Research On The Slider Wheeled Cigarette Separation Unit

Cigarette separation unit is one of the typical units of cigarette making and plugassembling machine. At present the mainstream structure is the structure separated bysliders in a wheel. As an effective way of mechanical product innovation, theapplication of servo drive has become one of the development trend of cigarettemaking and plug assembling machine, whose core technology is replacing thetraditional mechanical powerplant and transmissions with a power unit of servo motordrive system. Abroad, the servo drive has been widely used in cigarette making andplug assembling machine, such as the M-series cigarette making and plug assemblingmachine which is produced by HAUNI in German and use more servo drivetechnology instead of a mechanical transmission, reducing production cost s andimproving movement precision of units. Domestic corporations are in the phase ofintroducing, digesting the related technology of M-series while short of independentresearch. The key to use Servo drive on the separation unit is to optimize its loadcharacteristic, decreasing its load especially dynamic load.This paper focused on the cigarette separation unit in super high speed cigarettemaking and plug assembling machine. With the background of the application of driveservo, the optimization of load characteristic and structural improvements of the unitwere studied and researched.First of all, the Pro/E three-dimensional dynamic analysis model was establishedand the virtual prototyping technology was used to analyse the load characteristic ofthe current slider wheeled separation unit. The source of load was also studied.Then, in view of the cam curve optimization problems, a method to optimize camcurve using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm after modulating it was putforward. Aiming at the premature convergence problem in standard particle swarmoptimization (PSO) algorithm when dealing with multimodal optimization problems, adiversity feedback and control PSO (DFCPSO) algorithm was proposed.After that, the mathematical model of the slider wheeled separation unit wasestablished. Aiming at suitability for servo drive, based on optimization of cam curve,using method proposed before, the load characteristic of the separation unit wasoptimized. Results showed the fluctuation of the load of the separation unit decreases,which lower the requirements for servo motor’s performance. Eventually, to overcome the disadvantages of the motion block’s big mass andlong waiting time of current separation unit, some parts related to separation motionwere improved designed, reducing the mass of sliding parts, shortening the waitingtime and improving the moving characteristic parameters of cigarette separation. As aresult, the risk of cigarette damaged in the process of separation.