Computation of thermo-elastic deformations on machine tools a study of numerical methods

Modern machine tools are highly optimized with respect to their design and the production processes they are capable to. Now for further advances, especially a detailed knowledge about the thermo-elastic behavior is needed, because the nowadays still existing deficits are mainly related to this. That is why, endeavors in improvement, like the optimization of the design, the evaluation of new materials and the regulation of the production process, particularly rely on accurate computed thermal deformations. One possible approach to increase their quality is to also include the relevant structural variabilities of the machine tools as well as the resulting interactions between the coupled parts within the calculations. In this article, three different numerical methods are presented, which include structural motions in thermo-elastic analyses. Thereby, several conflicting criteria, like real-time capability, memory saving issues and accuracy are fulfilled each time in a different manner. Those methods are afterwards compared with respect to their runtime and accuracy. Finally, the paper concludes with a classification of the usability of the methods in real-time control and optimization tasks.