MODELING THERMAL DISPLACEMENTS IN MODULAR TOOL SYSTEMS

Abstract

There is an important interest in compensating thermally induced errors of modular tool systems to improve the manufacturing accuracy. In this paper, we test the hypothesis whether we can predict such thermal displacements by using a nonlinear regression analysis, namely the alternating conditional expectation algorithm (ACE [Breiman & Friedman, 1985]), reliably. The data analyzed were generated by two different finite element spindle models of modular tool systems. As the main result, we find that the ACE-algorithm is a powerful tool to model the relation between temperatures and displacements. The maximal correlation is larger than 0.999 in both cases, which demonstrates the suitability of the ACE algorithm. Furthermore, preconditions for the applicability of this approach, such as the length and the support of measured data sets, are studied. Hence, this approach seems to be promising for the application to real modular tool systems.