In an ideal world, web handling and converting systems would run smoothly, helping manufacturers meet their product commitments, and web materials would never break or have quality issues. When problems arise, they can be hard to narrow down and require assumptions about process, control, and materials to be reconsidered.
Having a simulation model of a perfect machine with perfect material running through it is a strong first step in understanding the complexity of the system. The model becomes more valuable when it can be expanded to include defects. This is used in troubleshooting to understand the effect of an existing defect or when developing a converting process to anticipate and design effective countermeasures.
One such defect is roller eccentricity. In MapleSim’s web handling simulation tool you can easily enable eccentricity on any roller (and wind/unwind) to study its impact on tension. The simulation results can show the tension difference when eccentricity on one or more rollers is applied..
A large converting equipment supplier was investigating a high end (~1 Million Euro) machine that was shipped to a customer site and after assembly, started experiencing unusually high tension-fluctuations. Roller damage during transportation was a possibility, but they hoped to investigate the cause of the excess tension without moving the hardware again. Working with Maplesoft, their engineering team gathered the data from a fully functional machine and used MapleSim’s Web Handling Simulation Tool to create an initial model of that system. The process engineers then injected roller eccentricities into the model and were able to replicate the same kind of failure that their customer was seeing. They concluded with confidence that the problem was caused by a particular roller as they could reproduce it on the simulation software.
This use of simulation avoided costly downtime that a more invasive trial-and-error approach would require. After seeing the value and capabilities of the simulation, their team now applies MapleSim simulation models for their product development tasks when building new machines.
