Servo design of a vertical axis drive using dual linear motors for high speed electric discharge machining

This paper proposes a synchronous control scheme for a linear servo system applied to the vertical axis drive of a die-sinking electric discharge machine (EDM) tool. The investigated vertical axis drive is constructed with dual parallel linear motors, which are arranged to jointly drive the feed axis for improvement of the overall thrust and structural stiffness. A pneumatic cylinder is employed to compensate the gravitational effect of the feed axis with its electrode and holder. A mechanical coupling is designed to firmly bridge the two linear motors and carry the feed axis. Therefore, synchronous control for the motors is critical for not only position accuracy, but also machine safety. Moreover, by controlling the thrust outputs and positions of the motors to be as equal as possible, the potential "pull and drag" effect between the motors can be reduced and loads can also be equally shared. The proposed "position/thrust hybrid synchronous control" scheme is applied to the EDM to achieve high-speed, accurate machining, and the experimental results show that the synchronization error between the two parallel motors and the positioning accuracy are both satisfactory when operated under high-speed conditions. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.