Enery-Efficient machine tools and technologies

Recently, production industries have to deal with the challenge to reduce its energy consumption due to more energy-conscious end-users and governments. Machine tool manufactures are therefore forced to improve the energy-efficiency of their products. Energy-efficiency also plays an important role in marketing, as this is a good opportunity for companies to improve their "green" image and stay competitive.
Research in advanced drive and guideway systems for machine tools with higher productivity has been a matter of interest for decades. Contradictory to common perception, both objectives, energy-efficiency and productivity, are not counteracting goals. Hence, strategies and solutions for low power consumption and high performance drive characteristics of machine tools are investigated and presented in this paper. A requirement-oriented control of auxiliary units as well as a reduction of process time allows for substantial improvements of the former. By promising implementations of advanced drive systems by means of active guides, jerk decoupling mechanisms and planar motion technologies the latter is taken into account.