R2R Operational Insights: Eccentricity and Tension Variations

A large converting equipment supplier was investigating a high end (~1 Million Euro) machine that was shipped to a customer site and after assembly, started experiencing unusually high tension-fluctuations. Roller damage during transportation was a possibility, but they hoped to investigate the cause of the excess tension without moving the hardware again. Working with Maplesoft, their engineering team gathered the data from a fully functional machine and used MapleSim’s Web Handling Simulation Tool to create an initial model of that system. The process engineers then injected roller eccentricities into the model and were able to replicate the same kind of failure that their customer was seeing. They concluded with confidence that the problem was caused by a particular roller as they could reproduce it on the simulation software.

This use of simulation avoided costly downtime that a more invasive trial-and-error approach would require. After seeing the value and capabilities of the simulation, their team now applies MapleSim simulation models for their product development tasks when building new machines.