In a pipe mill line, cutting operation is preceded by welding or forming operations. The cutting operation requires synchronization of the pipe speed with that of cutter so that no relative motion occurs between two movements.
In addition, this operation should be incorporated with an accurate length measurement of the moving pipe to have a desired length. But moving length measurement and speed synchronization, having a great correlation with productivity, are very difficult problem.
The main objective of this research is to study the applicability of microcomputer to pipe cutting system, thus exploring the possibility of replacing the currently used, sophisticated and expensive DDS controller.
A prototype of the pipe cutting system is developed, which is basically controlled by a D.C. servo-motor. PET microcomputer is used to generate a desired cutter movement and to calculate the instantaneous pipe length.
The experimental results show that the employment of PET microcomputer for controller, compared with DDS controller, enables the system to cut production costs, but have a coarse measurement accuracy by A/D digitization error.
