Process concatenation to reduce thermal changes in machine tools

Thermal effects in machine tools are responsible for a significant amount of produced scrap. Therefore, various approaches have been investigated and applied on machine tools to reduce thermal changes during manufacturing. Most of them target the machine tool and its operational state and can therefore just react to the thermal changes caused by the process. This paper shows how thermal changes can be reduced already in the manufacturing planning stage. With the use of a virtual numerical control (VNC) and loss models, power losses can be estimated, enabling the concatenation of processes to achieve minimal jumps in power loss from one process to another.