Add-on Error Compensation Unit as Sustainable Solution for Outdated Milling Machines

Machine tools are extremely important to stride the manufacturing sector of any country. Developing nations still rely on outdated machine tools. By upgrading the functionality of these machines, valuable resources can be saved. To follow up a sustainable approach improving machine tools’ accuracy will be accomplished without exchanging essential system components and only add-on components are being realised. Therefore, a two axes adaptronic compensation table is designed, manufactured and tested. The high precision module is integrated in a representative milling machine. Sensors of the add-on unit measure a significant portion of static, dynamic and kinematic inaccuracies. This data is used, with a feedback control, to compensate the errors by means of piezoelectric actuators. The add-on has its own control hardware and doesn’t rely on the control unit of the machine tool. The feasibility of concept is presented by means of direct-measurements on an exemplary outdated machine tool.