Abstract
The study concerns the control of the temperature distribution of a machine tool structure containing several varying heat sources and control sources. For this purpose, state equations of the machine tool temperature are formulated by utilizing the finite element method and an optimal control sequence is obtained by the linear programming method as a time-optimal control problem. In case of a very complicated structure of a machine tool, computing time to obtain the control sequence is considerably shortened by limiting reference points in com-putation without affecting the accuracy. The above method can be applied to a case for shortening the warming-up period of a machine tool as well as for varying heat sources. The validity of the control is experimentally confirmed.
