Development of Compliant Tool System of Digitalized Precision Polishing for Aspheric Surfaces

Aspheric surfaces of high precision and low roughness are widely used in the military field, the aeronautics and astronautics field and some high-tech fields. Therefore, research works on the methods and equipments of digitalized polishing for aspheric surfaces are a hot issue in the modern precision manufacturing. The traditional precision manufacturing mainly depends on the higher precision equipments to promote the surface quality of aspheric surfaces, but the cost of equipments seems to be extremely expensive. Taking the general CNC lathe of two axis interpolation as a platform, and basing on the controllable damping characteristic of the Magnetorheological Fluids (MRF), a new kind of compliant polishing tool system for aspheric surfaces is developed in this paper. The tool system keeps the polishing force to be stable by the torque servo unit of MRF, and implements the compliant polishing.