Design and manufacture of hybrid polymer concrete bed for high-speed CNC milling machine

To maximize the productivity of precision products such as molds and dies, machine tools should be operated at high speeds without vibration. As the operation speeds of machine tools are increased, the vibration problem has become a major constraint of manufacturing of precision products. The two important functional requirements of machine tool bed for precision machine tools are high structural stiffness and high damping, which cannot be satisfied simultaneously if conventional metallic materials are used for bed structure because conventional high stiffness metals have low damping and vice versa. This paper presents the application of hybrid polymer concrete for precision machine tool beds. The hybrid polymer concrete bed composed of welded steel structure faces and polymer concrete core was designed and manufactured for a high-speed gantry type milling machine through static and dynamic analyses using finite element method. The developed hybrid machine tool bed showed good damping characteristics over wide range of frequency (η = 2.93–5.69%) and was stable during high speed machining process when the spindle angular speed and acceleration of slide were 35,000 rpm and 30 m/s², respectively.