SIMULATION OF DYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF AIR GRIPPER BY A NEW BOND-GRAPH METHOD

This paper deals with the simulation of the dynamic characteristics of an air gripper by a new bond-graph method. Recently, pneumatic systems are widely used with food equipments and wrapping ones, etc. However, the design and the improvement of those pneumatic systems take much time because they depend largely on the experience of designers. In order to make them more effective and systematic, it is necessary and important to predict the dynamic behavior of the system beforehand by computer simulation. An air gripper is often used as an actuator in a pneumatic system. However, there are few reports focused on its dynamic characteristic as authors know. In this paper, to obtain a suitable mathematical model for an air gripper and to show the usefulness of the proposed bond-graph method, both experimental and simulation studies are performed. In modeling for pneumatic field, the new bond-graph method is employed, which had been proposed by some of authors. In the bond-graph method, a pneumatic system can be represented by using conventional 1-port C and 1-port R elements.