The innovation and development of mold technology puts forward higher requirements for machine tools

With the acceleration of the upgrading of consumer products, the mold technology is also constantly developing, and higher and higher requirements are put forward for the production efficiency and manufacturing quality of the mold. Therefore, the low production efficiency and unstable quality of the EDM molds, etc. The shortcomings are gradually exposed. In order to realize high-speed machining of mold cavity and related parts, the machine tool needs to have the following characteristics:

1. As the mold is developing in the direction of large-scale, molds of several tons to dozens of tons are very common, so the machine tool table is required to bear heavy weight, which requires the equipment to have the characteristics of large load-bearing and high rigidity. There must be a large enough table size and working stroke to adapt to it. In addition, the strength and hardness of the mold material are very high, and the mold cavity is often processed with a small-diameter end mill with a large elongation, so chatter vibration is prone to occur during the processing. In order to ensure the machining accuracy and surface quality of parts, high-speed machine tools used for mold manufacturing must have high dynamic and static stiffness to improve the positioning accuracy, tracking accuracy and vibration resistance of the machine tool.

2. High-speed and high-power high-speed machining is the development direction, and high-speed milling has shown great advantages in mold processing. In order to adapt to the processing of the mold cavity surface, the radius of the tool should be smaller than the minimum circumference radius of the cavity surface to avoid interference between the tool and the workpiece during the processing. Due to the small diameter of the tool, the spindle speed is required to be very high. The spindle speed of foreign high-speed machining machine tools has reached 40,000 to 100,000 r/min, and the rapid feed rate can reach 30,000 to 60,000 min. The roughing and finishing of cavity and other parts of mold parts are often completed in one clamping of the workpiece, so the spindle power must be large. The spindle power of medium-sized mold milling machines and machining centers is often 10-40kW, and some are even higher. (Guide: Is there a difference between a kind of welding nail and a pressure riveting screw)

3. Multi-axis linkage and good deep cavity comprehensive cutting ability. Most mold cavities are composed of complicated spatial six-curved surfaces and grooves, and many molds have deep cavities. In order to achieve high-precision, high-speed and high-stability machining of 3D curved surfaces, the machine tool requires multi-axis linkage and has a good comprehensive cutting ability for deep holes. A five-axis linkage machining center can be used. In addition to the linear motion of three coordinates, there are also two feed motions of rotating coordinates. The milling head or worktable can be multi-axis linkage for continuous rotation feed, which is suitable for processing mold parts with complex cavity surfaces.

It can be said that compound processing is one of the development directions of mold processing. Although the machining center has been able to combine many machining processes on one machine tool, it still cannot fully adapt to mold processing. It combines machining with electrical, chemical, ultrasonic and other different principles of processing methods, and has more than two process characteristics. The compound processing will have broad prospects in the future mold manufacturing.

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