A Novel Friction Compensation Method for Machine Tool Drive Systems in Insufficient Lubrication

Friction is the dominant factor restricting tracking accuracy and machining surface quality in mechanical systems such as machine tool feed-drive. Hence, friction modeling and compensation is an important method in accurate tracking control of CNC machine tools used for welding, 3D printing, and milling, etc. Many static and dynamic friction models have been proposed to compensate for frictional effects to reduce the tracking error in the desired trajectory and to improve the surface quality. However, most of them focus on the friction characteristics of the pre-sliding zone and low-speed sliding regions. These models do not fully describe friction in the case of insufficient lubrication or high acceleration and deceleration in machine tool systems. This paper presents a new nonlinear friction model that includes the typical Coulomb-Viscous friction, a nonlinear periodic harmonic friction term for describing the lead screw property in insufficient lubrication, and a functional component of acceleration for describing the friction lag caused by the acceleration and deceleration of the system. Experiments were conducted to compare the friction compensation performance between the proposed and the conventional friction models. Experimental results indicate that the root mean square and maximum absolute tracking error can be significantly reduced after applying the proposed friction model.