A Study on the Groove Design in Ball Screws

볼나사 그루브 상사비 결정에 관한 연구

Ball screws are commonly used in linear motion feeding systems of various machine tools and automated systems. They are known to have relatively little backlash, high precision and efficiency compared to ordinary lead screws. Furthermore, the effectiveness of ball screw has made it the preferred choice of many newly developed high speed precision feeding units. The motivation of this work is to establish the groove edsigh basis of ball screws for the reduction of contact fatigue failure. In most instances, fatigue failure between ball and shaft groove is due to excessive contact pressure. Especially, the excessive load is causative of plastic flow below the contact surface, which can contribute to surface failure. But, in spite of small load, if groove conformity rate is large, contact pressure is increased and internal shear stress reach the yield value of the material. In such a point, the authors deal with design procedure for deciding the permissible conformity rate of a ball screw groove with the computational evaluation of contact pressure and maximum shear stress.