Visualization and evaluation of the spatial kinematic rotation error of a five-axis abrasive water jet cutting head

Abstract

Abrasive water jet (AWJ) technology has been more and more used in space curved surface machining. Dynamic angle compensation technology based on the five-axis linkage control system was the core to eradicate the errors caused by taper and jet lag in AWJ machining and enabled this technology to get into some precision fields. But the spatial kinematic rotation error of the cutting head in five-axis AWJ machine tool which has a direct impact on AWJ machining performance and accuracy has not been systematically studied. Aimed at this, this paper explored a new method based on spatial meshes to obtain the spatial kinematic rotation error of the cutting head. According to the visualization of the experimental data, the spatial kinematic rotation error was found with no obvious pattern. Then, a dimension reduction method was employed to mining these data and enabled this irregular error to be predicted with mapping method. According to the verification experiments, this new method was proved efficiently and useful in predicting the spatial kinematic rotation error.