Evaluation of Rotational Speed Control System for Water Driven Spindle With Disturbance Observer

In ultra-precision machining to produce various precision products such as lenses or mirrors, the single-point diamond cutting is mainly carried out to achieve the high accuracy and high quality machined surfaces. Thus, the precise rotation accuracy is required to the spindle of the ultra-precision machining tool. The water driven spindle had been developed for the precision machining tool spindle. This spindle is driven by the torque of water flow power. Then, the rotational speed can be controlled by supplied flow rate of water. However, the rotational spindle speed during cutting operation is changed due to the influence of the cutting forces during the machining processes. The change in the rotational speed causes the change in the cutting speed, as a result, it degrades the machined surface quality as well. In order to reveal and reduce the influence of this phenomenon, the mathematical model of the rotational speed control system for water driven spindle was derived. This rotational speed control system consists of the water driven spindle and the flow control valve. From the simulation results using a derived transfer function of the rotational speed control system, it is clarified that the rotational speed changes depending on the external load torque. Then, based on the mathematical model, the feedback rotational speed control system with a conventional P-I controller is designed. The effectiveness of the proposed feedback control system is verified by the turning tests. Furthermore, a disturbance observer to minimize the influence of cutting forces on the rotational speed was added to the feedback control system. As a result, this paper shows the performance of the rotational speed control system.