Development of Proportional Valve Actuator Controller for Industrial Site

To proportionally control the electronic valve position of the actuator, we designed and fabricated PCU, CPT, and rotary absolute optical encoder for the detection of absolute angular position in the actuator. We also designed and constructed the test system by using DAQ hardware and Labview. We designed PCU to convert 1-5 V, 0-5 V, 0-10 V, 2-10 V voltage signals and 4-20 mA current signals to the voltage signals in the common 0.5-2.5 V range. We designed CPT to output 4-20 mA current signals corresponding to the valve positions based on the PWM signal input from the MCU. We also designed 20 bit optical encoder by using infrared LED and infrared transistor and made the serial communication with the main board possible. When we tested PCU and CPT with DAQ hardware and Labview software, they operated correctly with the small errors within V and mA, respectively, showing that our actuator has the excellent performance to employ as the industrial proportional-valve-actuator. The resolution of the encoder was and the maximum revolution to detect was 32,768.