In the production machinery industry, speed counts. Whether it is recycled paper or high-tech fabric, top production speed is required at all times, but not at all costs. In the 21st century, manufacturers have to deal with new environmental issues, as well as the most severe economic crisis of modern history. Careful use of energy, the precious resource of the new age, is mandatory.
The ESTOMAD (Energy Software Tools for Sustainable Machine Design) consortium was established in 2009 with industry players and research institutes like LMS International, Flanders’ Mechatronics Technology Centre, JOBS, EC Engineering, the Institute of Industrial Technologies and Automation, FIDIA and the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven. The European research project aims at creating a machine development process that considers energy efficiency as a critical parameter of machinery design.
Picanol is one of the industrial majors involved in the ESTOMAD project. Picanol develops and manufactures high-tech weaving machines based on airjet and rapier technology. For 75 years, it has played a pioneering role in the weaving machine industry, to become nowadays a leading global player. Besides its headquarters in Ypres, Belgium, the Picanol Group has an international presence with facilities in Asia, Europe and the US. Today, about 2,600 weaving mills around the world use Picanol machinery, totalling some 130,000 weaving machines.
Top weaving speed, low costs of ownership
Stringent market regulations and tough competitive environment make it necessary for the production machinery industry to improve its machine design processes. Manufacturers need to deliver top-performing machines that comply with strict health and safety requirements. Innovations are introduced to the market in shorter delays.
All these demands make early-stage simulation compulsory to release innovative products faster. The industry is also experiencing a recent shift in customer expectations.
Kristof Roelstraete, R&D manager at Picanol, senses the rising trend: “It is not all about price or performance anymore. More and more customers tend to choose the machine that offers the best deal in terms of total cost of ownership: they not only consider the initial investment price, but also maintenance and operational costs for the complete machine life cycle. Due to rising energy prices, low energy consumption is essential to manage operational expenses. Our products must deliver the highest fabric quality at the lowest total cost of ownership for the weaver. We have focused our efforts on energy-efficiency, to gain a remarkable competitive advantage.”
Early-stage design of energy-efficient machinery
Within the frame of the ESTOMAD project, Picanol improves the energetic balance of its weaving machines without sacrificing performance. In close collaboration with the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven, Picanol R&D engineers started with building the model of the energetic flows inside the main driveline of a weaving machine. Creating this model is a complex task: it should accurately predict all inner energy transfers and also expose local energy leaks. It needs to provide a detailed representation of each component’s energetic behavior while integrating it into the global machine’s multi-physics environment.
The ESTOMAD consortium has selected LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim as the mechatronic system simulation platform to perform energy management studies on real-world industrial machines. The LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim platform lets engineers consistently analyze all energy flows in the various sub-systems of a weaving machine, from the insertion system to the motor over the gearbox and main shaft.
To support the scalable optimization of energy flows, the LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim graphical user interface and the machinery components libraries have been specially updated to help engineers design environmentally-friendly machines. Picanol engineers optimize machine design from the earliest stage on, taking energy-efficiency as a critical performance requirement.
One step further in the development process, LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim is coupled with LMS Virtual.Lab in a co-simulation scheme. Consequently, even the complex 3D mechanisms of the weaving machine (which require a detailed dynamic and kinematic modeling) are simulated and optimized, benefitting also from the new LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim functionalities for a more ecological design.
LMS Imagine.Lab AMESet, the platform’s customization tool, now natively integrates all the required power and energy variables, meaning that specific components can easily and quickly be created and assessed with regard to their energy consumption objectives.
In the frame of the ESTOMAD study and with the particular involvement of the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven, Picanol engineers could seamlessly interface LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim with MATLAB to perform parameter identification. The Picanol-ESTOMAD project reveals excellent results correlation of LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim models and real-life measurements performed on weaving machines – a major study outcome that will help improve future machine development processes.
Now about the model-based system engineering of future weaving machines. The extensive LMS portfolio supports Picanol in the early-stage optimization of weaving machines, balancing all critical performance, durability, noise and vibration parameters while minimizing energy consumption. “We highly appreciate the products and support from LMS. Those help us design the most energy-efficient weaving looms on the market,” says Kristof Roelstraete. “A platform like LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim offers extensive libraries of components that also connect to describe complete multi-physics systems, a pre-requisite for advanced model-based system engineering. Achieving this with scripting programs such as MATLAB or Python is unrealistic.”
More projects focused on energy saving and energy management will probably be started in the near future, not only because of the expected monetary profit, but also in response to upcoming environmental challenges. Picanol is well-positioned to take the lead by designing the most ecological weaving machines on the market.
Kristof Roelstraete also predicts model-based system engineering will consequentially become a standard design procedure in the production machinery industry in the coming years.