Recently, improvement of productivity of the paper cup forming machine has being conducted by increasing manufacturing speed. However, rapid manufacturing speed imposes high load on cams and cam followers. It accelerates wear and cracking, and increases paper cup failure. In this study, a failure diagnosis algorithm was suggested using vibration data measured from cam driving parts. Among various paper cup forming processes, a test bed imitating the bottom paper attaching process was manufactured. Accelerometers were installed on the test bed to collect data. To diagnose failure from measured data, the K-NN (K-Nearest Neighbor) classifier was used. To find a decision boundary between normal and abnormal state, learning data were collected from normal and abnormal state, and normal and abnormal cams. A few representative features such as mean and variance were selected and transformed to the relevant form for the classifier. Classification experiments were performed with the developed classifier and data gathered from the test bed. According to assigned K values, a successful classification result was obtained which means appropriate failure recognition.

A paper cup forming machine performs the entire process to produce paper cups. Recently, as the demand for paper cups in various fields increases, the need for rapid and timely paper cup forming also increases. However, the more rapid the manufacturing speed is, the higher the possibility of forming failure. Frequent fault occurrences cause a time-consuming and costly repair process and reduces manufacturing efficiency. Among various fault factors in this research, position deviation of the paper from the original position, which induces a jamming and process stop, was selected and a novel deviation detecting system using multiple photo sensors was suggested. Before operating the position detecting system, the performance of the photo sensors was evaluated with respect to response speed and photo beam precision. A deviation detecting mechanism was designed. The developed deviation detecting system was integrated with the paper cup forming machine and experimented with using base papers. It was conformed that the suggested system could be used to diagnose paper deviation failure.

The automated inspection method of paper cups by using a deep learning classifier is proposed. Unlike conventional inspection methods requiring defect detection, feature extraction, and classification stages, the proposed method gives a unified inspection approach where three separate stages are replaced by one deep-learning model. The images of paper cups are grabbed using a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) camera and diffused LED lights. The defect patches are extracted from the gathered images and then augmented to be trained by the deep- learning classifier. The random rotation, width and height shift, horizontal and vertical flip, shearing, and zooming are used as data augmentation. Negative patches are randomly extracted and augmented from gathered images. The VGG (Visual Geometry Group)-like classifier is used as our deep-learning classifier and has five convolutional layers and max-pooling layers for every two convolutional layers. The drop-outs are adopted to prevent overfitting. In the paper, we have tested four kinds of defects and nondefects. The optimal classifier model was obtained from train and validation data and the model shows 96.5% accuracy for test data. The results conclude that the proposed method is an effective and promising approach for paper cup inspection.