An action-oriented teaching approach for intelligent and energy efficient precision manufacturing

Thermal errors of machine tools are a major contributor to inaccuracies of produced workpieces. Especially, the reduction of thermal errors without increasing the energy consumption of the machine tool and the shop floor due to exact air conditioning has a great social, scientific, and industrial relevance. Therefore, the Institute of Machine Tools and Manufacturing (IWF) at ETH Zürich set up a series of three lab courses to increase the awareness of undergraduate students on this important topic. In the first lab course the students elaborate how the carbon footprint of machine tools can be minimized over the whole live cycle including the manufactured products. Specifically, the students measure the energy demand and analyze the energy efficiency of the most important components of a 5-axis machine tool in different operating conditions. The second lab course focuses on the thermal chain of causes, which describes the physical fundamentals leading to the thermal deformations of machine tools. Temperature and displacement measurements as well as finite-element simulations of a purpose-built test bench visualize the characteristics of the thermal chain of causes. The third lab course completes the topic by dealing with model-based thermal compensation strategies, which enables a shift from resource-based towards intelligence-based reduction strategies for thermal errors. The students evaluate the thermal behaviour of a 5-axis machine tool with an on-machine measurement cycle and learn how to create physical and data-based thermal error compensation models.