Integrated approach for parallel machine tool conceptual design

In the past years parallel machine tools (PMT) have drawn more and more interest for the advantages of high stiffness, low inertia, high accuracy and high speed capability. Conceptual design of PMT, an iterative, complex, decision-making and creative process, is a very important step of PMT prototyping design flow presented in this paper, which includes conceptual design, dimensional design, system modeling, performance analysis and etc. The purpose of this paper is to provide a computer-aided conceptual design approach for PMT prototyping design, which integrated four different design methods detailed discussed in this paper: PMT case based conceptual design, parallel mechanism based conceptual design, combined conceptual design and type/number synthesis based conceptual design. The conceptual design software park for PMT is developed by UG development with Visual C++.