Design and Accuracy Analysis of a Micromachine Tool with a Co-Planar Driving Mechanism

Abstract

Due to the requirements of manufacturing miniaturized high-tech products, micromachining with micromachine tools has come to be regarded as an important technology. The main goal of this study is to build up the key technologies, including optimal structure and configuration design, synchronous driving control, analysis of optimal accuracy, in order to develop a low-cost and high-accuracy micromachine tool with a multi-degrees of freedom (DOF) platform with a co-plane synchronous driving mechanism. Due to the advantages of such a mechanism, the machine is able to possess a high feed resolution and high accuracy without the use of expensive drive components and high-end CNC controllers. Because of the no pile-up structure, the machine has less movement inertia effect, as well as the merits of light weight, high stiffness, and increased stability. Furthermore, the machine has more DOF, resulting in a better cutting performance than that of 3-DOF machine tools. To better understand the characteristics of major error sources of the machine in order to further enhance its accuracy, hybrid error analysis, kinematics analysis, and a volumetric error model were conducted. Finally, a prototype of the designed micromachine tool was built, and cutting experiments for accuracy calibration and verification were carried out using this machine. The results showed that the machine was able to effectively execute 4-DOF microcutting with positioning accuracy of 800 nm.