Adaptive wire diameter control of the high-precision optical fibre drawing machine

Abstract Different from the conventional methods such as the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID)-based method, an adaptive control algorithm (ACA) is proposed in this paper to control the wire diameter of high-precision fibre drawing machines (FDMs). A simple FDM model is established to acquire the relationship between fibre diameter and drawing velocity before the ACA is introduced. The comparison simulation of the accuracy of fibre diameter between the proposed ACA and traditional PID is made, and the ACA is applied to actual fibre drawing processes, so as to validate the ACA. The comparative results show that the fluctuation of filament diameter is smaller and the accuracy is higher under the ACA control. In actual fibre filament drawing processes, the ACA can limit the diameter error within ± 2 μ m , which meets the production requirements.