Active coolant control onto thermal behaviors of precision ball screw unit.

Being a critical factor affecting the motion accuracy of precision machine tools, structural thermal elongation of precision ball screw unit is generally caused by the comprehensive influence from heat generations of screw-nut pair/bearings and time-varying ambient temperature. To resist 2 thermal disturbances above to guarantee precisely the original length of screw shaft, an active coolant control strategy is proposed in this paper. This strategy is based on a premise hypothesis: For the slender and long tubular structure of screw shaft, the screw shaft temperature is approximately equal to its recirculating coolant temperature. The reason is that the intensive forced coolant convection is capable of eliminating screw shaft temperature rises caused by friction heat generations and ambient air convections. Based on this premise, screw coolant temperature can be consistently controlled by an active strategy, further to correct the thermal elongation of screw shaft. It can be experimentally verified that the thermal variations of machine positioning accuracy caused by the active coolant control strategy are not more than 10 μm, which are lower than traditional strategy. Besides, based on detected structural temperatures of precision ball screw unit, the theoretical model above is further proved to be reliable by FE simulation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]