Performance of AC servo axial-infeed incremental warm rolling equipment and simulated production of spline shafts

The AC (alternating current) servo axial-infeed incremental warm rolling equipment was studied in this paper on the basis of the integration of process and equipment. Firstly, the details of each subsystem are discussed to demonstrate the features of the novel rolling equipment. Next, the performance of the AC servo axial-infeed incremental warm rolling equipment is investigated through the experiments. The whole rolling process of spline shaft lasted about 2 min in the rolling equipment, which is greatly reduced compared with traditional processes. The testing results of rotational speed show that the root mean square error (RMSE) values of speed are less than 5%, which indicate that the rolling equipment can ensure the precision of rotational speed through servo system. Finally, the simulated production of spline shafts was carried out on the rolling equipment. According to the dimensional measurement results of the formed spline shaft, the percent of pass is 80% for the simulated production. In addition, the microstructure observation and the hardness measurement proved that the formed spline shafts possess an excellent performance.