Looking back in the new century, breakthrough in the bottleneck (Reporter Gao Bo) The backwardness of the machine tool was once the bottleneck of China's manufacturing industry. After 10 years of development, domestically produced machine tools in some areas are no less than similar foreign products.

Ten years ago, in the series of “technical bottlenecks” organized by Science and Technology Daily, when Qu Xianming, the deputy director of the Technical Committee of the Mechanical Science Research Institute, underwent an exclusive interview, he pointed out that it is difficult for the state to invest in the manufacturing industry. The reintroduction of the "difficult circle", although some or all of the imported technology has been transplanted to domestic similar products, there is almost no innovation.

At that time, experts pointed out that the research and development of CNC machine tools is a top priority, and the “flexibility, processing accuracy, and efficiency of the machine tools should be greatly improved, which will lead to a fundamental shift in our manufacturing and processing levels.” At that time, China's CNC machine tool market was monopolized by foreign businesses. Because of the lack of stability, our own developed machine tools are difficult to compete with foreign high-quality machine tools.

The machine tool is the starting point for all manufacturing. In the past ten years, has the level of machine tools been the bottleneck in China's manufacturing industry? The reporter once again interviewed Qu Xianming experts.

“In the past 10 years, the scale of Chinese manufacturing has grown rapidly. According to the data of the previous year, it is probably 25% per year.” Qu Xianming pointed out that the rapid growth of the manufacturing industry has stimulated the demand for domestic machine tools and promoted the technological progress of domestic machine tools. . At the CNC machine tool trade fair held in Nanjing this year, we looked ahead and looked at the machine tools of domestic brands.

“Compared with ten years ago, the level of CNC machine tools in China has increased a lot.” Qu Xianming said, such as five-axis linkage machine tools, China could not produce 10 years ago, and now there are several domestic brands.

Qu Xianming believes that the remarkable progress in the level of machine tools in recent years has enabled us to achieve breakthroughs in some manufacturing sectors. As one example, the successful domestically produced 36,000 tons vertical extrusion press made it possible for China to produce large-caliber thick-walled pipes. Therefore, the price of similar products in Japan has been forced to drastically reduce. Some other heavy-duty machine tools have reached the international advanced level, and domestic five-axis machine tools are also a landmark achievement.

However, we still have not mastered production technologies for some important high-end CNC equipment. This has caused us to be constrained in some of the most important manufacturing sectors such as large aircraft and integrated circuit manufacturing. Therefore, to achieve a full-scale manufacturing industry, high-end numerical control equipment still has to overcome difficulties.

"In advanced technology, we are still in the stage of follow-up." Qu Xianming said that China's CNC machine tools still have a gap in terms of speed and precision. The same specifications of the product, foreign machine tool speed is probably three times the domestic machine tools, accuracy is also close to an order of magnitude higher.

Qu Xianming told reporters that CNC machine tools are a very complex industry in terms of production. The technical bottleneck of domestic machine tools is hard to attribute to a single specific link. In general, CNC machine tools consist of digital control systems and machine tools. China has a gap between these two aspects.

On the one hand, high-performance CNC systems are the key factors that determine the performance and cost of the entire machine. The domestic high-end CNC machine tools exhibited at this year's Nanjing Expo use CNC systems from foreign companies such as Siemens or Fanuc. The domestic CNC system has obvious gaps from the advanced world level in terms of high-speed, high-precision, five-axis processing and intelligent functions. This is due to the difference in the architecture of the domestic CNC system (hardware platform, software platform, field bus), high-speed and high-precision control algorithms, and servo drive. On the other hand, functional components such as electric spindles, double-swinging heads, turntables, and nano-precision gratings, as well as the core technologies for the design and manufacture of complete machines, are also key constraints for manufacturing high-end machine tools in China. The improvement of the overall technology of CNC machine tools in China is ultimately inseparable from the support of advanced functional component industries.

The above-mentioned gaps have come from many reasons such as poor quality management, insufficient technology accumulation, and low R&D investment, which require a long time to resolve. Nevertheless, Qu Xianming's expectations are still optimistic. He believes that the huge domestic market demand is a positive factor in stimulating technological progress. It can be expected that by 2022, the high-end CNC machine tools needed in various fields of manufacturing will have a large number of products produced in China.