Feedback control–based active cooling with pre-estimated reliability for stabilizing the thermal error of a precision mechanical spindle

The thermal error stability (STE) of the spindle determines the machining accuracy of a precision machine tool. The “active cooling-spindle” system is regarded as a feedback control system, and the data-driven thermal error model is utilized to output feedback. In this way, the spindle thermal error can be stabilized by the homeostasis ability of the feedback control system under disturbance. Structural temperature measurements are considerably interfered by the active cooling, so the regression models trained with experimental data might output inaccurate feedback in unseen work conditions. Such inaccurate feedbacks are the primary cause for excessive fluctuations and failures of the thermal error control processes. The independence of the thermal data is analyzed, and a V-C (Vapnik–Chervonenkis) dimension–based approach is presented to estimate the generalization error bound of the regression models. Then, the model which is most likely to give acceptable performance can be selected, the reliability of the feedback can be pre-estimated, and the risk of unsatisfactory control effect will be largely reduced. Experiments under different work conditions are conducted to verify the proposed strategy. The thermal error is stabilized to be within a range smaller than 1.637 μm, and thermal equilibrium time is advanced by more than 78.3%.