Control Design of Machine Tool Feed Drives Using Mechatronic System Simulation

Machine tools are among the most important components in modern production engineering where cost-effective manufacturing of parts with high geometric accuracy is required. The mechanical components of the machine together with feed drives and digital control loops form a complex mechatronic system which must be designed and optimized simultaneously. A mechatronic system simulation is developed, suitable for mutual optimization of mechanical structure, feed drives and control loops including multi-axis configurations like gantry and main-sub. Simulation results are compared to measurements on real machine tools and show excellent agreement. Furthermore, flatness-based exact feed forward control is used to significantly improve machine tool performance in simulation studies.