An analysis of heat source contribution and design of optimal cooling method for ball screw feed system

Fundamentally, the heat source in the ball screw feed system accounts for the thermal behavior of ball screw. Due to the fact that cooling resources are not always sufficient, the main objective of this paper is to allocate cooling resources for multiple heat sources. The network model of ball screw thermal deformation and temperature at the heat source is constructed based on wavelet neural network (WNN). Combined with the mathematical analysis results, the explicit mathematical expression of thermal deformation and heat source under this working condition is deduced, and the explicit mathematical expression of heat source contribution is further obtained. After that, keeping the total heat source contribution constant under this working condition, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to determine the heat source contribution distribution that can minimize the thermal deformation of the ball screw. Finally, through the design of the ball screw cooling system, the minimum thermal deformation of various heat sources at different cooling ratios under constant cooling flow is explored. The contribution of heat source is basically consistent with the optimal cooling ratio, which not only verifies each other, but also shows that the uniform cooling of heat source can best inhibit thermal deformation.