Industrial consideration of thermal issues in machine tools

Regarding the undisputed relevance of thermal errors, the question arises in which way the consideration of several activities will lead to an improvement of the thermal behavior of machine tools. The answer comes from 75 small to very large machine tool manufacturers and mainly larger production companies from Europe and Asia. Therefore, the entire process chain is considered, from design, assembly to the installation conditions and procedures in daily operations of the machine tool. The companies describe the expenditure regarding the design and the organization to increase the thermoelastic manufacturing accuracy. There are the following remarkable facts. The use of mineral castings is highly dependent on the region. In addition to the thermo-symmetric design, heat removal is an alternative design solution. There are only a few alternatives for tempering. Corrective methods can be very diverse. The consideration of the installation conditions strongly depends on the company size. In addition, the necessary measures in the operation are described by the users, for which purpose they often remain in contact with the manufacturers. Finally, the paper discusses the difficulties regarding the control of thermal behavior from an industrial perspective, deriving future research areas and establishing work priorities.