Thermal error modeling for machine tools: Mechanistic analysis and solution for the pseudocorrelation of temperature-sensitive points

The temperature-sensitive point is the input variable of the thermal error compensation model of computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools. At present, the most commonly used selection method is to measure the multipoint temperature and thermal error of the machine tool synchronously and select several temperature measurement points with the highest thermal error correlation as temperature-sensitive points according to the measurement data. This study reveals that this method sometimes has obvious mis-selection and causes the model to fail. The reason is that the weak correlation temperature measurement point away from the machine tool heat source amplifies the volatility of the correlation evaluation result, owing to the small overall change. If the calculated result exceeds the true strong correlation temperature measurement point, it will be incorrectly selected as the temperature-sensitive point. This scenario has been termed herein as the pseudocorrelation problem. With the gradual popularization of thermal error compensation technology for CNC machine tools, pseudocorrelation will seriously affect the mass production pass rate. Therefore, the study analyzes and rigorously proves the mathematical mechanism of this problem, and the temperature measurement point preselection algorithm based on the correlation coefficient volatility determination factor (CCVDF) is proposed to eliminate potential pseudocorrelation temperature points before selecting temperature-sensitive points. After 1000 random simulation experiments, the failure rate of Z-direction thermal error modeling after preselection decreased from 5.1% to 0.5%, and the Y-direction error decreased from 33.7% to 1.5%. This algorithm can greatly improve the qualification rate of large-scale equipment of thermal error compensation technology.