Simultaneous geometric and thermal error control of gear profile grinder based on analytical correlation between tooth surface error and position error of grinding wheel/workpiece

The gear profile grinder is important to ensure the geometric accuracy of tooth surfaces. However, its machining accuracy is significantly reduced by the geometric and thermal errors. So the geometric and thermal errors should be controlled simultaneously. The geometric error modeling and decoupling of the gear profile grinder are studied, and the mapping relationship between the geometric accuracy of tooth surfaces and machine errors is constructed. To establish a robust thermal error model, a physically-based model is established to prove the feasibility of using the bidirectional long short term memory network (Bi-LSTMN) to establish a self-learning error model. The high-frequency noises are filtered and singular values are reduced by the Savitzky–Golay (SG) filtering algorithm. An attention-gate-based Bi-LSTMN (AGBi-LSTMN) is proposed to reduce the time complexity. Then the mixed-variants whale optimization algorithm (MVWOA) is proposed to optimize the hyper-parameters, and SG-MVWOA-AGBi-LSTMN is proposed for the thermal error prediction. Finally, the simultaneous geometric and thermal error control is implemented. The results show that the total tooth profile precision is increased by ISO level 3, and the tooth profile tilt precision is increased by ISO level 5 with the simultaneous geometric and thermal error control.