Abstract
In this paper, general evaluation method for machine tool thermal stiffness is considered. Particularly, through the influences of each material properties of machine tool structure on the thermal deformation are studied in detail, it is shown that there are some thermal deformation characteristics which can not be evaluated by the thermal stiffness derived from the relationship between the thermal deformation and the representative temperature. However, every thermal deformation characteristics can be represented by the one derived from the relationship between the thermal deformation magnitude and the total heat flow. Then, the generality and validity of this method is made clear.
