A Study on the Drive at Center of Gravity (DCG) Feed Principle and Its Application for Development of High Performance Machine Tool Systems

For high performance machining, it is essential to minimize the vibration of a machine tool, which is incurred due to the instantaneous acceleration/deceleration. To minimize this vibration, it is fundamentally ideal to apply the driving force at the most shock-insensitive position of the moving structure: the center of gravity. Aiming at developing unparalleled high-performance machine tool systems, the effectiveness of the Drive at the Center of Gravity (DCG) principle on vibration reduction has been studied thoroughly by analytical and experimental approaches. Based on the results obtained, a new design of the high-performance machine tools has been discussed with a special focus on the installation of DCG mechanism without sacrificing any advantages already obtained in the recent basic design rules. The paper also describes the comparative study between a machine tool based on the DCG principle and the one with a conventional driving configuration. The results obtained have shown a distinctive performance difference in machining stability.