Design Conception of Hierarchical Modular Construction — Manufacturing Different Kinds of Machine Tools by Using Common Modules

Summary

The necessity of increasing the flexibility of a machine tool, which constitutes a EMC machine tool group in a CAM system or in an automatic production cell, is becoming higher recently. Whereas, the rationalization for the design and manufacturing procedure of general-purposed machine tools is also largely required, especially considering the aid of a computer. To fulfill these requirements arising newly, it is of importance to establish a new design method for a machine tool structure available for the real modular construction.

In this paper, one conception for the new design method, i.e., the hierarchical modular design system has been proposed on the basis of the results of structural analysis, paying particular attention to the validity of the proposed design method and the problems to be solved in future. In addition, the description of a structure, which is the most fundamental subject in the proposed design method, has been investigated. The structure description investigated here consists of the coding system arranged in the order of the flow of force in a machine tool structure to consider the importance of structure dynamics, and to express completely the structure pattern.