Principles and techniques for designing precision machines

Abstract

This thesis is written to advance the readerÕs knowledge of precision-engineering principles and their application to designing machines that achieve both sufficient precision and minimum cost. It provides the concepts and tools necessary for the engineer to create new precision machine designs. Four case studies demonstrate the principles and showcase approaches and solutions to specific problems that generally have wider applications. These come from projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in which the author participated: the Large Optics Diamond Turning Machine, Accuracy Enhancement of High-Productivity Machine Tools, the National Ignition Facility, and Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. Although broad in scope, the topics go into sufficient depth to be useful to practicing precision engineers and often fulfill more academic ambitions.Many people contributed to this thesis in a variety of different ways, and I would like to thank and acknowledge these people for their knowledge, their ideas and their efforts. The thesis committee consisted of Professors Alexander Slocum, Carl Peterson and John Lienhard V all of MIT and Dr. Robert Donaldson who was my supervisor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from 1990 to 1993. If I please only one person with this thesis, I hope Bob Donaldson is that person. I thank Alex Slocum for motivating me to begin a doctoral program and for being a role model for professional achievement. My thesis committee has been unduly patient and tolerant of probably too few interactions drawn out over too long of a time. Their suggestions helped make this thesis better for you, the reader, for which I am very grateful. Leslie Regan and the staff at the ME Graduate Office helped me many times during my enrollment at MIT; thank you for being so good.My thanks go to two well-known figures in Precision Engineering, Tyler Estler from NIST and James Bryan formally from LLNL, who provided many valuable comments on an early draft. They did so out of dedication to the field.A number of my colleagues reviewed specific sections and/or collaborated on the projects used as case studies in the thesis. Debra Krulewich reviewed sections on error budgets, separation techniques, transformation matrices and least-squares fitting. Todd Decker reviewed the introduction to exact-constraint design. Eric Marsh reviewed the chapter on damping. Rick Montesanti reviewed the chapter on practical exact-constraint design. Terry Malsbury reviewed the EUVL examples of exact-constraint design. Jeff Klingmann reviewed the chapter on the conceptual design of a horizontal machining center.

A New Type of Waveguide Distribution for the Accelerator Module Test Facility of the European XFEL

“…The design of the distribution system fully complies with the principles of kinematic design in order to avoid any mechanical stress during installation and stress due to thermal expansion during operation [8].…”

Design and Fabrication of a Planar Three-DOFs MEMS-Based Manipulator

“…According to the principle of exact constrained design [4], [18], [19], ideally, the suspension has zero stiffness in the actuation direction, while it has to be infinitely stiff in all other DOFs. Achieving relatively small stiffness in actuation direction is limited by the minimum feature size in lithography and the desired minimum stiffness in other directions.…”

A metaheuristic for fast machining error compensation

“…Every machine tool has its own error budget serving to predict its accuracy and repeatability (Slocum 1992). The error budget helps identify where to focus resources to improve the accuracy of an existing machine or one under development (Hale 1999). Every workpiece can be also given certain error budget which stands for an acceptable error in machining it.…”

“…Identification and compensation for particular errors is difficult time-consuming and costly, moreover their total eradication is in most cases impossible. The amount of errors can be limited even while designing the machine tool (Hale 1999) or they can be measured and compensated for (Sartori and Zhang 1995). Compensation can relate to the chosen errors or the total error.…”