Design of automatic control device for ropeway tension adjustment in hilly orchard

According to the problems that traditional manual or mechanical ropeway tension adjustment approaches were subjected to intensity limits and failed to detect real-time dynamic variations for driving-chain tensions, which causing corresponding hysteretic nature and poor self-adaption, a related device was designed to automatically adjust driving-chain tension by corresponding variation detection and PID control under different payloads for improving transportation security and reliability of fruits and agricultural products in mountain orchard. As a result, the detected mean values of driving-chain tension were ranging from 653.5944 N to 763.4059 N when ropeway system was running under no control, and ranging from 508.1988 N to 568.7609 N under PID control. In conclusion, this system could effectively achieve automatic driving-chain adjustment with maximum tracking error of 104 N and mean error of 13.6417 N.