Research on the Digital Twin for Thermal Characteristics of Motorized Spindle

Abstract With the increase of spindle speed, heat generation becomes the crucial problem of high-speed motorized spindle. In order to obtain the actual thermal behavior of a motorized spindle, a digital twin system for thermal characteristics is developed in this paper. The mechanism of digital twin for thermal characteristics is to simulate the thermal behavior of a machine tool through mapping and correcting the thermal boundary conditions using the data acquisition system and correction models. The proposed digital twin system includes three modules which are the digital twin software, the data acquisition system, and the physical model with embedding sensors. The digital twin software is developed based on the Qt with the C++ programming language and the secondary development of ANSYS. Correction models for thermal boundaries are proposed to correct the heat generation and thermal contact resistance using the temperatures measured by the data acquisition system at thermal key points. To verify the prediction accuracy of the digital twin system, an experiment is carried out on a motorized spindle. The experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of the digital twin system is greater than 95%. It is of great significance to improve the accuracy of thermal characteristics simulation and thermal optimization.