Development of a force controlled orbital polishing spindle

In the production chain for steel molds, polishing is the last essential process step to guarantee the required form accuracy and especially the surface roughness. This is true for the polishing of molds for optics manufacturing as well as the mold manufacturing in the field of aviation, automotive or consumer products industry. One of the characteristics for the current process chain is that in most cases this last step is done by manual labor which is extremely time consuming and cost intensive. Moreover the polishing result is crucially depending on the workers skills and education. To overcome these limitations the Fraunhofer IPT recently developed and evaluated a fully automated polishing cell which enables for the first time to conduct a completely automated and reproducible finishing process, and by this means an important competitive advantage for high-wage countries. In the future a standard 6- axes industrial robot with a novel force controlled orbital polishing spindle will displace the manual processor.