Reliability Oriented Performance Test System Of Chain-type Magazine And ATC

Tool magazine and ATC (Automatic Tool Changer) are crucial functional components and the weak links of the fault locations of the CNC machining center. So the study on reliability of magazine and ATC is important to improve the reliability of machining center. The failure of magazine and ATC is a gradual progress from quantitative to qualitative, with the changes of some performance parameters (such as vibration, noise, position accuracy, etc.). In order to provide a test basis for the reliability growth technology based on performance parameters changing, a set of reliability oriented performance test system of chain-type magazine and ATC is developed.According to the working principle and motion characteristics of magazine and ATC, functional requirement analysis of the reliability oriented performance test system of chain-type magazine and ATC has been done, and the testing items such as the kinematical characteristic of manipulator, the magazine positioning error, vibration on the tool oriented part and noise have been determined. The working principle of every testing subsystem is interpreted in detail. Based on characteristics of PSD (position sensitive detector) and binocular vision measurement principles, a PSD based measuring instrument is developed which can measure the spatial coordinate of the moving point of light’s center position. It is applied to testing the angular rotation and axial shifts of manipulator. The computer vision measuring method for the magazine positioning error measurement is studied through the one dimensional edge extraction algorithm. Meanwhile, the testing methods of the acceleration of manipulator, vibration on the tool oriented part and ATC running noise by utilizing wireless accelerometer sensor, the piezoelectric vibration sensor and the sound pressure sensor respectively are explored. On the basis of hardware system of the reliability oriented performance test system, the software development has also been done based on LabVIEW programming platform and the functions of signal sampling, numerical operation, data preservation and testing reports print have been realized. Then the developed reliability oriented performance test system of chain-type magazine and ATC is used to estimate the performance of chain-type magazine and ATC produced by Dalian Golden CNC Group Corp. The experimental data proves its feasibility. Under reasonable test time interval and performance parameters changing thresholds, this system will alert the operators to do some repairing in time when performance parameters degrade badly to prevent the failures effectively so as to avoid or decrease losses, then the reliability of magazine and ATC can be improved.