Jk. Choi et Dg. Lee, THERMAL-CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPINDLE BEARING SYSTEM WITH A GEAR LOCATED ON THE BEARING SPAN, International journal of machine tools & manufacture, 38(9), 1998, pp. 1017-1030
High cutting speeds and feeds are essential requirements of a machine
tool structure to accomplish its basic function which is to produce a
workpiece of the required geometric form with an acceptable surface fi
nish at as high a rate of production as is economically possible. Sinc
e bearings in high speed spindle units are the main heat source of tot
al cutting system, in this work, the thermal characteristics of the sp
indle bearing system with a tilting axis were investigated using finit
e element method to improve the performance of the spindle bearing sys
tem. Based on the numerical results, a specially designed prototype sp
indle bearing system was manufactured. Using the manufactured spindle
bearing system, the thermal characteristics were measured and compared
to. the numerical results. From the comparison of the numerical resul
ts with the experimental results, it was found that the finite element
method predicted well the thermal characteristics of the spindle bear
ing system. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.