Abstract
Polishing process has been applied to get extremely fine surfaces, e.g., mirror surfaces such as optical mirrors, lens, molds and etc. Nowadays not only fine surface quality but also submicron order of dimensional accuracy is required for many applications. To meet the requirements polishing process should be provided with an active control of polishing pressure especially for automation of polishing process. In this paper a study on development of an active polishing pressure control system has been presented. A new type of tool assembly has been developed to facilitate the control. The tool is attached to an axis of a polishing machine with a coil spring and control of the polishing pressure is done by the position control of the axis, which needs no additional actuator. The polishing pressure is successfully measured by the measurement of the spring deformation. Control specifications were quantitatively considered by weighting functions and a controller was designed by using loop-shaping technique based on the no synthesis. Some experiments have been executed on a polishing machine with a PC-NC controller. It is shown that the results were coincident well with the theoretical analyses and satisfied the design specifications.
