Walking into the pilot workshop of the South Center of the China Academy of Mechanical Sciences, I saw that a batch of newly purchased high-end manufacturing equipment was neatly placed in the ultra-precision workshop with constant temperature and humidity. This batch of equipment will be used to produce domestic guide rails and lead screws, so as to solve the problem of “stuck neck” and import substitution of key functional components of “industrial machine tools”.
Guide rails and lead screws are high-precision linear transmission products, and they are also important components of machine tool transmission systems, which are mainly used in CNC machine tools, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical equipment, industrial robots, automobiles and other fields. According to the division of accuracy, the lead screw can be divided into 8 grades, such as P0, P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P7, P10, etc., of which P0 has the highest accuracy, and the accuracy decreases step by step. According to Yuan Cheng, a R&D personnel of the South Center, due to the lack of technical support, P1 and P0 precision products have not yet been mass-produced in China, and 80% of the high-precision guide rails and lead screws need to be imported from abroad.
In order to get rid of foreign technical constraints and produce high-precision “domestic” guide rails and lead screws as soon as possible, as the “national team” of mechanical equipment research and development, the South Center actively set up a scientific research team to build the most complete domestic process of guide rails and lead screw test verification platform, take the lead in breaking through from the point, and drive the core technology research on the whole surface.
“The South Center has built nearly 1,000 sets of high-end equipment, and after three months of installation and commissioning, the entire batch of equipment has now entered the trial production stage, and is launching the final ‘sprint’ to the domestic substitution of key functional components.” Yuan Cheng introduced that the entire trial production stage is expected to take half a year, and then it will enter the mass production stage to achieve domestic substitution of imports, which will effectively help domestic manufacturing enterprises shorten the delivery time of equipment and reduce production costs. “In the research and development of key functional components, in addition to strictly benchmarking against international standards, we also pay attention to updating material selection, pay attention to heat treatment, continue to promote product updates and iterations, and maximize the life of the lead screw.”
In order to further break through the data barriers, the South Center is committed to the R&D and design of high-end equipment such as machine tools while accelerating the production of key functional components, and “feeding” the production line with high-end equipment, so as to form a “closed loop” of the whole process of R&D and production equipment.
In the next step, the South Center will continue to play a platform role to promote breakthroughs in key core technologies of “industrial machine tools”, and provide “hard core” support for the high-quality development of China’s manufacturing industry.
(Source: Ningbo Science and Technology Bureau)