Development of a Dedicated CNC Controller for Wheel flow Forming Machine and Experimental Performance Evaluations

This research describes the performance data of the aluminum automobile wheel manufactured by wheel flow forming machine. The performance is examined after designing and operating the CNC controller which is customized for the wheel flow-forming machine. In general, the existing wheel flowforming machine simultaneously controls the 3 rollers and axis, which results in the degradation of the quality of the product due to syncing to the slowest one and slowing down in its processing speed. In order to solve this problem, multi-channel CNC controller has been developed and is able to independently control each individual roller and axis in short cycles. In order to practice the multi-channel CNC, the mutual communication of the fundamental structure of the CNC controller utilizes sync signal and each thread is applied with the sharing memory data sync method through the EtherCAT communication. When producing wheel forming by utilizing the customized CNC controller, it has been found that there had been a great improvement in processing time (productivity) and degree of precision, in comparison to the existing wheel flow-forming machine.