Temperature Control of an Oil Cooler System For Machine Tools Using a Fuzzy- Logic-Based Algorithm

Recently, technical trend in machine tools is focused on enhancing of speed, accuracy and reliability. Such high speed usually results in thermal displacement and structural deformation. To minimize such thermal effect, most precision machine tools adopt high precision cooling system. This study proposes a temperature control for an oil cooler system using PI control with fuzzy logic. In a cooler system, the refrigerant flow rate is controlled by rotational speed of the compressor, where the outlet oil temperature is selected as the control variable. The fuzzy control rules iteratively correct PID parameters to minimize the error, difference between the outlet temperature and the reference one. Here, the ambient temperature is used as the reference one. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, a series of experiments are conducted for an oil cooler system of machine tools, and the results are compared with the ones of a conventional PID control. The experimental results show that the proposed method has advantages of smaller overshoot and smaller steady state error.