Laser processing equipment is a kind of intelligent numerical control machine tool. Its principle is that high energy density laser is irradiated on the material after being focused by the lens to quickly melt the vaporized material, so as to complete cutting, carving, marking, welding and other processing requirements. Compared with traditional processing technology, laser processing has the advantages of high precision, fast speed, beautiful cutting seam and small material deformation, and is one of the current mainstream processing technologies.
The laser equipment is a machine tool, and its mechanical axis movement is mainly driven by the motor, so the corresponding motion control system is also naturally needed to solve the motion control problem. There are three main types of motion control schemes for CNC machine tools, namely motion controller, motion control card and software controller. Laser processing mainly uses motion control card as motion control solution.
Motion controller Motion controller, namely PLC, is an independent digital operation processor with microprocessor. The internal structure of PLC is similar to that of microcomputer. It is composed of power supply, CPU, data memory, digital analog conversion unit, input/output interface and other functional units. It has the functions of motion control, logic control, timing control, multi-computer communication, etc.
The main advantage of the motion controller is its strong stability and anti-interference ability, but it is slightly insufficient in accuracy, efficiency and other aspects. Therefore, the motion controller is rarely used in laser equipment.
Motion control card The motion control card is a kind of upper control unit based on PC or industrial PC. Its principle is to use high-performance processors and large-scale programmable devices to send continuous high-frequency pulses, and control the motor speed by changing the high frequency of the pulse, so as to achieve high-performance motion control of servo motor or stepper motor.
Motion control card is the mainstream motion control solution for laser equipment, which is widely used in different types and different power laser machines. Based on the operation mode of PC, the motion control card can easily realize various functions required by the processing party with the help of the huge database on PC, including linear interpolation, circular interpolation, multi-axis linkage, drawing, visual recognition, etc., which meets the flexibility requirements of the new type of NC machining.