Abstract
In recent years, combination machining by turning and grinding has been subject of manifold research. This kind of machining offers a promising approach to combine the high material removal rates of turning with a good surface quality reached by grinding processes as well as a reduction of the primary processing time and the ancillary time. In some cases, the required surface quality is beyond the capabilities of any grinding processes, therefore, other finishing processes e.g. honing becomes necessary. Honing offers a unique surface quality, high process reliability and a low surface roughness error. This paper describes the integration of a honing process into a combination machining center. Different processes like turning, grinding and honing can be carried out in a single workpiece chucking, thus allowing efficient processes and an extremely high workpiece quality. Unlike conventional honing centers, the honing tool is mounted without any degree of freedom. Consequently, the tangential and axial effective motion as well as the rotation is generated by the spindle-mounted workpiece. The rigid design of the honing tool should help to reduce the roundness errors, the cylindricity errors and the position errors. The emphasis of the investigations is placed on the influence of varying machining parameters such as the stroke speed, the peripheral speed and the machining time on the surface quality and the shape accuracy of the workpiece. The infeed motion is obtained by using a linear actuator that allows the conventional position-controlled infeed and, additionally, a force-controlled infeed. The results show that the integration of a honing process into a combination machining centre enables an improvement of the shape accuracy as well as the surface quality.
KEYWORDS - Honing, combination-machining-center, surface quality, shape accuracy