Beschreibung
Automated fine positioning for machining of heavyweight components, such as gears for marine, mining or power engineering, offers significant potential for reducing setup process time. Therefore, a fine positioning system based on a novel compact piezo hydraulic pump has been developed. The system allows precision positioning of large components in 4 degrees of freedom (DOF). The presented design is able to compensate eccentric errors of ±2.5 mm, tumbling errors of ±0.1° of work pieces with a weight up to 4.7 t. A flexible circular membrane is used as a flexure bearing for the tumbling unit. The linear axes are crossed one above the other. Based on the original model, a scaled (1:31) tumbling unit was designed and realized for experimental analyses. The scaled prototype was analyzed regarding its stiffness and accuracy. Both values have been evaluated to be sufficiently high. A positioning accuracy of 4.5 μrad is expected for the original size model.