A Decade of Domestic Machine Tools in the New Century: Overcoming Bottlenecks
Published Time:
2020-03-17
Outdated machine tools were once a bottleneck in China's manufacturing development. After ten years of development, domestically produced machine tools in some areas are comparable to their foreign counterparts. Ten years ago, in a series of columns on "Technological Bottlenecks" organized by Science and Technology Daily, Qu Xianming, then vice director of the Technical Committee of the Mechanical Science Research Institute, was interviewed and pointed out that the country's investment in manufacturing was difficult to escape the vicious cycle of "introduction, backwardness, and re-introduction." Although some or all of the introduced technologies were transplanted to domestic counterparts, there were almost no innovative achievements. At that time, experts pointed out that the research and development of CNC machine tools was an urgent task, and that the "flexibility, precision, and automation" of machine tools should be improved.
Outdated machine tools were once a bottleneck in China's manufacturing development. After a decade of development, domestically produced machine tools in some areas are now comparable to their foreign counterparts.
Ten years ago, in a series of columns on "Technological Bottlenecks" organized by Science and Technology Daily, Qu Xianming, then deputy director of the Technical Committee of the Mechanical Science Research Institute, was interviewed and pointed out that the country's investment in manufacturing was difficult to escape the vicious cycle of "importing, falling behind, and importing again." Although some or all of the imported technologies were transplanted to domestic counterparts, there were almost no innovative achievements.
At that time, experts pointed out that the research and development of CNC machine tools was an urgent task, and the "flexibility, machining accuracy, and efficiency of machine tools should be greatly improved to fundamentally change our manufacturing and processing level." At that time, China's CNC machine tool market was still monopolized by foreign businesses. Our own machine tools lacked stability and struggled to compete with high-quality foreign machine tools.
Machine tools are the starting point of all manufacturing. Ten years later, is the level of machine tools still a bottleneck for Chinese manufacturing? The reporter recently interviewed expert Qu Xianming again.
“Over the past ten years, China's manufacturing scale has grown rapidly. According to data from two years ago, it's approximately 25% per year.” Qu Xianming pointed out that the rapid growth of manufacturing has driven domestic demand for machine tools and promoted technological advancements in domestically produced machine tools. At this year's CNC Machine Tool Expo in Nanjing, many of the machine tools on display were domestic brands.
“Compared to ten years ago, China's CNC machine tool technology has improved significantly,” said Qu Xianming. For example, ten years ago, China could not produce five-axis linkage machine tools, but now several domestic brands are producing them.
Qu Xianming believes that the significant progress in machine tool technology in recent years has enabled breakthroughs in some manufacturing areas. For instance: the successful domestic production of a 36,000-ton vertical extrusion press has enabled China to produce large-diameter, thick-walled pipes, forcing Japanese manufacturers to significantly lower their prices for similar products. Other heavy machine tools have also reached internationally advanced levels, and domestically produced five-axis machine tools are also a landmark achievement.
However, we still haven't mastered the production technology for some important high-end CNC equipment, which restricts us in some of the most important manufacturing areas such as large aircraft and integrated circuit production. Therefore, to achieve a comprehensive take-off in manufacturing, high-end CNC equipment is still a difficulty that must be overcome.
“In terms of advanced technologies, we are still in the follower stage,” said Qu Xianming. China's CNC machine tools still have a gap in terms of speed and precision. For products of the same specifications, the speed of foreign machine tools is approximately three times that of domestic machine tools, and the precision is about an order of magnitude higher.
Qu Xianming told reporters that CNC machine tools are an industry with extremely complex production processes. The technological bottlenecks of domestically produced machine tools cannot be attributed to a single specific aspect. Generally speaking, CNC machine tools consist of a digital control system and the machine tool itself. China has gaps in both aspects.
On the one hand, high-performance CNC systems are key factors determining the performance and cost of the entire machine tool. The high-end domestic CNC machine tools exhibited at this year's Nanjing Expo all used CNC systems from foreign companies such as Siemens or Fanuc. Domestic CNC systems have a noticeable gap compared to world-leading levels in terms of high-speed, high-precision, five-axis machining, and intelligent functions. This is due to the comprehensive gap in the domestic CNC system's architecture (hardware platform, software platform, fieldbus), high-speed and high-precision control algorithms, and servo drives. On the other hand, functional components such as electric spindles, dual swing heads, turntables, and nano-precision gratings, as well as core technologies in the design and manufacturing of the entire machine, are also key constraints in the manufacture of high-end machine tools in China. The overall improvement of China's CNC machine tool technology ultimately depends on the support of the advanced functional component industry.
The gaps mentioned above stem from multiple factors, including poor quality management, insufficient technological accumulation, and low R&D investment, all of which require a considerable amount of time to solve. Despite this, Qu Xianming's outlook remains optimistic. He believes that the huge domestic market demand is a positive factor driving technological progress, and it is expected that by 2020, a large number of high-end CNC machine tools required in various manufacturing fields will be domestically produced.
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