Screw thermal characteristic analysis and error prediction considering the two-dimensional heat transfer structure

Thermal error is a common problem in machine tool processing. It is usually proposed to take the screw as a one-dimensional rod heat transfer system to solve the thermal error of the screw by establishing a thermal characteristic equation. This method regards the temperature on the nut as the temperature of the screw contact surface without considering the heat transfer distance between the screw and the mounting point on the nut. To solve this problem, this paper takes the screw-nut feed system as a two-dimensional heat transfer structure considering both the screw and nut. In addition, to solve the low convergence speed and easy fall into a local optimum problem in optimal parameter identification, the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IPSOA) is proposed to identify the boundary parameters of thermal characteristics equations. Finally, the temperature and thermal error of the screw-nut feed system is calculated by the identified results. Experiments under different working conditions show that the maximum prediction residual error of the two-dimensional method (TDM) is less than 7.2 μm, and the simulating prediction accuracy can reach 86.2%. Besides, compared with the one-dimensional model (ODM), TDM has a higher prediction accuracy, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.