When we are holding beautiful and thin mobile phones, when we are sitting on high-speed and convenient high-speed trains and airplanes, we rarely associate these accustomed life scenes with the machine tool industry. However, the fact is that machine tools, the "machine for manufacturing machines", are even more of a "national weight tool" for the improvement of comprehensive national strength.

Although China's machine tool industry continues to grow, it is accompanied by numerous difficulties such as intensified international technology blockade and bottlenecks in independent research and development. In particular, high-end machine tools in important fields such as aerospace are still subject to others, and the development of the industry is facing "big but not strong" "The dilemma.

The creation of Chinese own high-end machine tools has become an "proposition of the times" that must be dealt with urgently.

At the China (Beijing) International Machine Tool Exhibition (CIMT2021) held recently, the "High-speed Vertical Five-axis Machining Center VMC40U" jointly developed by Shanghai University of Technology (hereinafter referred to as Shanghai Polytechnic) and Qinchuan Machine Tool Group Has gained the eyes of the industry. This school-enterprise team composed of teachers from Shanghai Polytechnic University and engineers from Qin Chuan took only two years to make the domestic machine tool "transformed" and surpassed the technical level of similar international machine tools. This "breakthrough war" has awakened the country. Manufacturing potential in traditional industries.

To be the new "wind maker" in the machine tool industry

The technical gap between the existing domestic high-precision machine tools is not large. High-precision manufacturing can be achieved only by increasing the weight. However, high-speed machine tools require the structure of the machine to be lighter, which will lead to high-speed operation. Vibration makes it impossible to achieve high precision. Therefore, it is difficult to satisfy both high-precision and high-speed modes at the same time.

Yan Jianbo, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of Qinchuan Group, once said that if a machine tool is vividly described in one sentence, it is: from a distance, it is a mechanical product, a close-up view is a handicraft, and if you look closely, it is mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc Application of basic disciplines. For example, the thermal characteristics of CNC machine tools have an important impact on machining accuracy, and the thermal characteristics here involve knowledge of physics.

"Machine tools in the aerospace field can only rely on imports. Two years ago, we wanted to buy a'rotating table' for machine tools from a German company, but we were directly rejected." The team leader in charge of this research and development project, Shanghai Polytechnic Institute of Mechanical Engineering Professor Li Haolin said, “This also stimulated our fighting spirit. We must build one by ourselves and stop talking at other people’s faces.” As it happens, the Qinchuan Group at that time also targeted the aviation industry. "High-precision machine tools" do not ask for quantity, but to make the world's top machine tools. So the Shanghai Polytechnic team and Qinchuan engineers hit it off and started the road of research and development.

In the view of Professor Li Haolin, the process of research and development is a matter of course. Shanghai Polytechnic is good at design and research, while Qin Chuan is proficient in manufacturing and assembly. In the end, the "high-speed vertical five-axis machining center VMC40U" they built became the first high-end CNC machine tool in my country with a motion acceleration of 2G, achieving a positioning accuracy of 4 microns and a repeating positioning accuracy of 2 microns. In terms of accuracy and high-speed technical indicators All have reached the world-class level, and this school-enterprise cooperation R&D team will also become a new "wind maker" in the machine tool industry.

Success stems from the "superior method" of repeated polishing

"The main structural changes of the machine tool must be cautious." This is an "unwritten" regulation in the machine tool industry. From the perspective of the enterprise, a set of molds can cost hundreds of thousands of thousands to be researched and reformed by colleges and universities with "no practical experience", and the cost of trial and error is too high. However, colleges and universities that are proficient in scientific research methods have nowhere to conduct experiments to prove their methodology, and they can only talk on paper. This has become one of the obstacles to the school-enterprise industry-university-research cooperation.

In 2015, more than 1,000 machine tools of the Shenyang Machine Tool Group urgently needed to solve the vibration problem. The chairman of the group Guan Xiyou approached Shanghai Polytechnic. After three months of machine tool testing and transformation, the team of Professor Li Haolin effectively solved the machine tool vibration problem. Since this cooperation, the two parties have reached a consensus on continued cooperation and jointly established the Shenyang Machine Tool-University of Shanghai for Science and Technology i5 Intelligent Machine Tool Joint Laboratory. Shenyang Machine Tool Group directly dispatched a team of engineers to "stay" in the school laboratory, and students from the School of Mechanical Engineering also took advantage of the winter and summer vacations to go to Shenyang Machine Tool Plant for practical operations, greatly improving the efficiency of design-R & D-production.

In addition to strengthening cooperation with the factory, Professor Li Haolin has not forgotten to carry out research and study with the team. "Shanghai Polytechnic is next to the Shanghai Machine Tool Factory. I used to go to the factory three or four times a week. I often met factory leaders on the avenue of the factory. They would tease me and say that'Shangli employees' are coming again. "Li Haolin recalled with a smile.

In addition, as long as there is time and opportunity, Li Haolin will go to the University of Stuttgart in Germany and other leading foreign research institutes to study. “Knowing yourself and the enemy can survive all battles. We will learn from foreign teams. If they encounter a machine tool problem, take a look. How did they solve it and what they are studying and focusing on, which helps us to open up our thinking and keep up with the international level."

It is precisely in this process of close cooperation with the company and non-stop research and study, the Li Haolin team has gradually changed from providing technical services and technical consultation to the company to the verification of machine tool design methods, and finally after repeated polishing, it has formed a test that can stand the test of the industry. The "Shangli Method" of the company has injected "core strength" into the "High-speed Vertical Five-axis Machining Center VMC40U" project that was unveiled at the exhibition.

Li Haolin said that next, the team set the goal to establish an "industry standard", hoping to optimize the existing machine tool design method to turn it into a unified reference standard for the domestic machine tool industry and promote the overall improvement of the quality of domestic machine tools. .