Increasing the technological effectiveness of manufacturing the support carriage of a screw cutter lathe during modernization

The relevance of modernizing metal-cutting equipment is caused by the requirements to improve operational characteristics and the need to maintain the cost of the offered machines at a certain level, despite inflationary processes. Moreover, the second direction should not be accompanied by a deterioration in the quality of machine tools. Therefore, it can only be realized by reducing manufacturing costs and, first of all, by increasing the manufacturability of the design. This area is especially relevant for universal metal-cutting equipment, including domestically produced screw-cutting lathes, the need for which to equip small metalworking enterprises is very high due to the fact that they are suppliers of multi-product components for enterprises in the automotive, aviation and defense clusters. The article discusses possible changes in the design of the slide carriage of a screw-cutting lathe. The complexity of the carriage shape and the variety of acting force factors require reasonable confirmation of the preservation of high performance characteristics, in particular, strength and rigidity. It is not possible to solve the problem posed using analytical or empirical dependencies without significantly simplifying the calculation models. Therefore, numerical modeling was used using the finite element method in the Ansys Workbench 2021 system. The construction of a computational model is described and the stages of conducting a numerical experiment are considered. The need to evaluate the proposed design changes that increase the manufacturability of the carriage and the variability of power factors required the consideration of 18 numerical experiments that differed in the conditions of conduct. Based on the calculation results, the maximum total deformations and equivalent von Mises stresses were determined. Research has shown that the proposed changes in the design of the carriage do not lead to its weakening, since the locations of maximum stresses are sufficiently remote from the areas from which elements that impair manufacturability were removed.