Power Consumption Assessment of Machine Tool Feed Drive Units

Numerous efforts have been made to assess and model the power consumption of machining process, which has led to many standards for energy labeling of machine tools. However, more investigation is required to improve the applicability of these standards because the energy patterns of machines vary widely with respect to the machine type, size, and configuration. Hence, it is aimed to develop a methodology to determine the power consumption characteristics of a wide variety of machine tools. This research focuses on the power consumption of feed drive units, which are largely varying components with respect to machine tool configurations. Two notable phenomena were observed during our experiments. First, the power consumption of an axis in the gravitational direction exhibited a different pattern from that along those of the other axes. Movement in the gravitational direction was investigated in more detail from the perspective of the machine tool configuration. Second, during multi-axis movement, no power correlation between different axes was confirmed. Regardless of the axis composition, no correlation was detected between the individual power consumption profiles of each axis. Elucidating the power consumption characteristics of feed drive units would contribute toward standardization and simplification of power measurement procedures.