Further application and amelioration of a novel CNC aspheric grinding machine

Aspheric surface can be thought as being enveloped by a series of spherical surfaces with their centre on the same axis but having different positions. These spherical surfaces are tangent with the aspheric surface. A Φ600 CNC aspheric grinding machine with this novel operating principleis manufactured. The machine was reported in August 2005. We choose δp, ε and αp as the key parameters of our grinding machine. δp is the distance between the cup shaped tool's bottom and the vertex of the aspheric surface. αp is the rotational angle of the cup shaped tool. ε is the space angle of the cup shaped tool during the fabrication process of convex aspheric surface. This grinding machine can be used to fabricate a conic concave aspheric surface continuously about three hours. But we need change the cup shaped tool one time when we fabricate a conic convex aspheric surface in also about three hours. The grinding machine can also be used to fabricate high-order aspheric surface. In the last report we intoroduced that we used this machined fabricating a RC telescope system's primary and the secondary mirror. The PV-value is less than 5μm for the primary Φ350 concave hyperbolic aspheric surface which departure is about 55μm. The residual errors can be removed easily. This machine have been improved both the cup shaped tool and filter system. Using this grinding machine we have fabricated another Φ460 concave aspheric surface during the last month. The PV-values of these two mirrors are both less than 7μm. The aspheric grinding machine can be fitted for fabricating concave conicoids.