Development and characteristics research of flexible manufacturing cell for optical free-form surface

Abstract

The manufacturing of optical free-form surface is a difficult point in industry, so the development and research of the integrated manufacturing equipment for optical free-form surface has become a key issue. In the paper, the flexible manufacturing cell for optical free-form surface with four Z-axis closed modules is developed, which includes 3D printing module, milling module, grinding module, and polishing module successively, the columns of the flexible manufacturing cell adopt a mechanical shunt design, the optical component is transferred from one module to another by the robot, positioned by the zero-point positioning system, and can be processed in each module in turn by coordinate transformation. The processed optical component has low surface roughness, low surface residual stress and surface damage, ensuring the optical component has good optical performance, the flexible manufacturing cell can achieve high-quality and high-efficiency machining of optical free-form surface. Because each module has similar structure, the milling module is carried out the static and dynamic simulation research using finite element (FE) method and virtual prototype (VP) method, the simulation results show that the milling module has excellent performances, the gravity balance device combined with the mechanical shunt column can significantly improve the precision of the milling module.