Rotary-axial Positioning System with Giant Magnetostrictive Element

In this study, in order to fabricate micro structures on free-form surface with a Fast Tool Servo for milling process, a rotary-axial positioning system for a machine tool spindle was newly proposed. This positioning system developed is driven by a giant magnetostrictive element (GME) during rotation, and the GME is used not only as an actuator but also as a sensor simultaneously in order to estimate its displacement for the hysteresis compensation. The performance evaluation results confirmed that the developed positioning system achieves the rotary-axial positioning with a resolution of 0.25 μm during rotational speed of 2500 min-1 without additional displacement sensors.