Simulation of Particle Motion on Rotating Cone Feeder for a Multihead Weigher Based on Dynamic Friction Modeling

This paper deals with particle motion on a cone-shaped feeder unit of an industrial multihead weigher, that distributes products through rotation. Thereby, rotational speed, rotational direction, and constraint-dependent friction substantially influence particle motion. Thus, particle motion is modeled considering dynamic friction and constraint forces for a viscoelastic case. Due to the cone-shape of the feeder, a specific kinematic model is proposed that comprises a differentiable restriction functions for calculating constraint forces. Afterwards, simulation results are tested against real data for a food application. Furthermore, application cases for the resulting model are proposed: The model can be incorporated into a digital twin environment of the weigher as well as used to generate simulation data for data-driven control algorithms.