Fuzzy Control of Automatic Brush-Plating Process

In manual brush-plating process, the coating quality is assured by the experience of the operator. The operator continuously regulates the plating voltage, the speed of the work piece, and the moving speed of the stylus handle according to the plating state he is watching. While in automatic brush-plating process the parameters above are also needed to adjust automatically so as to obtain coating with high quality and, to meet the requirement of piece dimension. However on this occasion the difficult is how to convert the experience of the operator into the suitable control algorithms of the machine. In order to achieve this purpose, a fuzzy controller has been developed, which adopts the coating thickness, the solution temperature, the plating current density, and the deposit rate as input variables, while the relative speed between stylus handle and work piece, the plating voltage, the longitudinal moving speed of stylus handle, and the flux of solution as output ones. The controller has been applied to an automatic brush-plating machine, and the experimental results are satisfactory and help certify this method’s applicability.