Design of Three-axis ED Milling Machine Based on the PMAC Motion Card

Abstract

This paper presents a new three-axis ED milling machine, which is based on the PMAC motion card. The machine is composed of the motion system, the control system, the working fluid supplying system and the EDM pulse generator. First, the motion system , the working fluid supplying system, the hardware of the control system, and the EDM pulse generator have been built, then the software system of the industrial computer has been developed based on the Visual Basic 6.0 in order to control the machine and monitor the status of the machine. Using the PMAC motion card, the servo control program, the decoding program and the PLC program have been programmed. The software system of the EDM pulse generator is implemented based on a good real time operating system called μC/OS-II, and the software system is composed of three main tasks, namely the data processing task, the communication task and the monitoring task. The milling experiments have been carried out on the ED milling machine based on the PMAC motion card, and the results show that the ED milling machine is steady and reliable when milling with three-axis.