INTELLIGENT DRILLING- DIRECT-DRIVEN, SELFOPTIMIZING HIGH-SPEED DRILLING SPINDLES FOR FURNITURE INDUSTRY

Time and resources are already an important issue in wooden industry and handicraft tl1at will become more and more important the next years. Components for furniture production, particularly in the industrial sector, are usually manufactured in automated process chains. State- of-the-art for drilling is the usage of systems with bevels, belt drives, angle gears and rigid drilling units. Due to the operating direction and slow working cycles, drilling processes are the bottleneck of production. These rigid drilling gears are currently very intensive in maintenance and inflexible because their spindles are usually mechanically coupled , which leads to unnecessary and excessive energy consumption. Another problem with systems currently in use is the huge amount of setup costs. They are required to adjust drilling units on different components. This leads to an impairment of productivity of the entire manufacturing process. At this point the question arises how quality and efficiency of the drilling process can be increased. lt is obvious that the drilling process must be made more intelligent and more flexible. An approach for an optimized drilling process is the use of self-optimizing spindles in future. Therefore a detailed analysis of drilling processes and the development of an eligible feed control are required. According to these requirements a laboratory machine was developed and furthermore the theoretical and practical state-of-the-art of drilling processes were analyzed. To develop a self-optimization for drilling spindles a research project is currently being realized in cooperation between the Laboratory for Woodworking Technologies and Machinery (HS-OWL, Germany)), the Laboratory for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (HS-OWL, Germany) and the Wittenstein motion control GmbH (Bad Pyrrnont, Germany).