Sensory Milling Chuck for Correction of Thermal Tool Deformation by In-process Temperature Measurement and Correction Value Calculation

The tool heating associated with machining processes causes thermal expansions of the tool structure, which reduces the machining accuracy. Due to increasing demands on the resource-efficiency of production, the use of cooling lubricants to compensate for thermally caused tool structure deformations is to be reduced or even completely avoided. To maintain the required manufacturing tolerances the development of a correction method on the control-side was carried out, which calculates a correction value for thermally induced expansion using the temperature curve of the tool structure. Therefor a sensor system, attached to a customary milling chuck, which is capable to measure several chuck-temperatures, was developed in this paper. To enable in-process measurement, the sensory chuck was equipped with wireless communication and energy transmission. The recorded temperatures can be used to calculate a correction value for the thermal linear expansion of the tool structure, which is used to increase the machining accuracy.