Dynamic temperature gradient and unfalsified control approach for machine tool thermal error compensation

In this work, a novel machine tool thermal error modeling method based on dynamic temperature gradient is proposed, and a thermal error compensation method based on unfalsified control is developed. The dynamic temperature gradient is used to optimize the locations of temperature measuring points on the machine tool. Real-time compensation for the thermal error can be achieved using the developed compensation method by establishing the correlations between dynamic temperature gradient and thermal error in the machine tool. Different from traditional model-based methods, the developed compensation approach does not rely on an accurate model of the thermal error but instead uses online input/output data to adaptively select the best controller at any moment, thereby improving thermal error prediction accuracy and robustness. The effectiveness of the developed thermal error compensation method is demonstrated on a turning center, where the spindle thermal error is compensated during the manufacturing of 120 inner bore parts and 120 shaft parts. After compensation using the proposed approach, thermal errors are reduced from 27 omega m to 9 omega m for the inner bore parts and from 31 omega m to 11 omega m for the shaft parts, respectively.