Development of Active Vibration Isolation System for Precision Machines

摘要

It is a common understanding by manufacturers of precision machines that vibrations are a potentially disastrous threat to precision and throughput. To satisfy the quest for more stable processes and tighter critical dimension control in the microelectronics manufacturing industry, active vibration control becomes increasingly important for high-precision equipment developers. This paper introduced the development of an active vibration isolation system for precision machines. Innovative mechatronic approaches are investigated that can effectively suppress both environmental and payload-generated vibration. In this system, accelerometers are used as the feedback sensor, voice coil motors are used to generate the counter force, and a TI DSP controller is used to couple sensor measurements to actuator forces via specially designed control algorithms in real-time to counteract the vibration disturbances. Experimental results by using the developed AVI prototype showed promising performance on vibration attenuation. It demonstrated a reduction of the settling time from 2s to 0.1s under impulsive disturbances; and a vibration attenuation level of more than 20dB for harmonic disturbances. The technology can be used to suppress vibration for a wide range of precision machines to achieve fast settling time and higher accuracy.