Performance Evaluation of Dual-Motor Driving System for Pipe Belt Conveyor Based on Current Tracking Master-Slave Control

The pipe belt conveyor is usually driven by several motors. The unique viscoelastic property of the belt is prone to cause load imbalance between individual driving motors and imbalance in the output power of the driving motors. This paper focuses on the pipe belt conveyor whose head is driven by two motors. The dynamic mechanical model of the pipe belt conveyor is built based on the Kelvin model. Based on the three-phase asynchronous motor vector control system, the two-motor power balance principles are presented. A master-slave control strategy is proposed, where the speed of the master motor is given and the current of the slave motor is tracked. A joint simulation model of the pipe belt conveyor is built via AMESim and Simulink to simulate the starting process of the conveyor. The simulation and test results demonstrate the validity of proposed dynamic mechanical model the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.