Development of a Virtual Milling Machining Center Simulation System with Switchable Modular Components

Abstract

The application of traditional three-axis milling machine center is very popular and the related application technology is also much matured resulting in mechanical components to be machined with good quality. Machine tool has therefore become an inevitable facility in precision manufacturing. Furthermore, the pursuit of higher precision machining has thus demanding five-axis machine tool to be adopted owing to its flexibility and capability in machining more precise mechanical components in shorter time. However, one of the key factors for the popularity in smooth introduction of five-axis machine tool would be based on a very user friendly learning and teaching environment. This is partly because two more rotational axes in a five-axis machine tool could generate very complex toolpath movement that is out of the imagination of a general operator. Furthermore, the price of an industrial five-axis machine tool is not normally affordable by an educational institute; to the worse, the maintenance cost is also very high. There is very high risk for a novice to collide during the learning process and this will generally cause big worry of a teacher. This paper aims for the development of a virtual machining center simulation system with switchable modular components to ease the learning process in getting acquainted with a five-axis machine tool. A five-axis machine tool consists generally of two modules: (1) CNC controller and Operation panel, and (2) machine tool hardware. The developed system will provide the novice with four CNC controller with operation human machine interface (HMI), and three typical types of five-axis machine tool, Head-Head (HH), Head-Table (HT), and Table-Table (TT), are also supported. The developed modularized and switchable machining center simulation system has been successfully developed and is very helpful to both learner and teacher

Investigating the learning performances between sequence‐ and context‐based teaching designs for virtual reality (VR)‐based machine tool operation training

“…Our research team has been devoted to engineering education, including machine tool education , engineering innovation education , and software engineering education for several years. We have also studied many techniques to develop superior solutions for VR‐based machine tools and have tried to apply the techniques in training . Because teachers’ teaching design is an important factor that affects the performance of the training, we compared the training performance of different teaching designs for machine tool education in this study.…”