A Study on Design of Alignment Accuracy of 5-Axis Machine Tools.

Abstract

Machine tools are recognized as key components of manufacturing systems, and product quality and cost mainly depend on performances of the machine tools. Much progress has been made in the machine tool technologies aimed at improving the performances of machine tools from various viewpoints, such as accuracy, reliability, productivity, and flexibility. One of the most important revolution in the later part of this century is introduction of NC (Numerical Control) machine tools, which is able to carry out various complicated machining processes without human interaction. Various types of multi-axis NC machine tools are now being applied to generation of complicated surfaces of the mechanical products. It is now required to clarify the relationships between the kinematic errors of machine tools and the geometric errors of the generated surfaces, in order to generate the complicated surfaces with high accuracy. The objective of the research is to establish a mathematical model on the basis of shape generation theory to represent the alignment errors of the machine tools, especially 5-axis machine tools, and to carry out theoretical analysis of machining errors based on the proposed model. A systematic method is also proposed to select a suitable combination of feed axes based on the requirement on the machining accuracy.