Hydrostatic guideways are widely applied into precision and ultra-precision machine tools. Meanwhile, the oil film heat transfer causes thermal disturbance to the machine accuracy. Therefore, it is necessary to study the mechanism of the oil film heat transfer and the heat-transfer-reducing method to improve the machine accuracy. This paper describes a comprehensive thermal finite element (FE) simulation modeling method for the hydrostatic machine feed platform to study methods of reducing machine thermal errors. First of all, the generating heat power of viscous hydraulic oil flowing between parallel planes is calculated based on the Bernoulli equation. This calculation is then employed for the simulation load calculations for the closed hydrostatic guideways, which is adopted by the hydrostatic machine feed platform. Especially, in these load calculations, the changing of oil film thickness (resulted from external loads) and the changing of oil dynamic viscosity (influenced by its temperature) are taken into account. Based on these loads, thermal FE simulation modeling of the hydrostatic machine feed platform is completed to predict and analyze its thermal characteristics. The reliability of this simulation modeling method is verified by experiments. The studies demonstrate that the hydrostatic machine thermal error degree is determined by the oil film heat transfer scale, and this scale is mainly influenced by the relative oil supply temperature to ambient temperature (quantitative comparison of oil supply temperature and ambient temperature). Furthermore, the reduction of the absolute value of this relative oil supply temperature can reduce the oil film heat transfer scale and improve the machine accuracy.
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