Development and design of a drive unit enabling electrochemical orbiting with high dynamics

Electrochemical machining is a suitable process for micro and precision manufacturing. To overcome several disadvantages like geometrical restrictions of the workpieces due to the uniaxial sinking the paper presents an new approach. The common kinematic is sequential or continuously superimposed by an orbiting movement of the workpiece which is defined as a circular translation. However using conventional machine components limits the orbiting frequency to a maximum of 2 Hz. The paper shows the development and design of a drive unit enabling electrochemical orbiting up to 50 Hz. To reach this goal a unique kinematic concept was carried out including an adaptive unbalance compensation for different workpiece weights and the movable orbiting radius.