Working principle of linear guide rail

Time:2026-04-07   

Hiwin HG Series Linear Rails

It is a type of rolling guidance that uses steel balls to infinitely roll and circulate between the slider and the guide rail, allowing the load platform to easily move linearly along the guide rail with high precision and reducing the friction coefficient to one fiftieth of that of traditional sliding guidance. It can easily achieve high positioning accuracy. The final unit design between the slider and the guide rail enables the linear guide rail to simultaneously bear loads in all directions, including up, down, left, and right. The reflux system and simplified structural design enable HIWIN's linear guide rail to move more smoothly and with lower noise. Sliding block - converts motion from a curve to a straight line. The new guide rail system enables the machine tool to achieve fast feed speed, which is a characteristic of linear guides when the spindle speed is the same. Linear guides, like flat guides, have two basic components; One serves as a fixed component as a guide, and the other is a moving component. Due to the fact that linear guides are standard components, for machine tool manufacturers, all they need to do is process a plane for installing the guide rails and adjust the parallelism of the guide rails. Of course, for the accuracy of the machine tool, a small amount of scraping and grinding on the bed or column is essential, and in most cases, installation is relatively simple. The guide rail used as a guide is made of hardened steel and is finely ground before being placed on the installation plane. Compared with flat guide rails, the geometric shape of the cross-section of linear guide rails is more complex. The reason for the complexity is that grooves need to be machined on the guide rails to facilitate the movement of sliding components. The shape and number of grooves depend on the function that the machine tool needs to complete. For example, a guide rail system that can withstand both linear forces and overturning moments has significant differences in design compared to a guide rail that can only withstand linear forces. The basic function of the fixed component (guide rail) of the linear guide system is like a bearing ring, a bracket for installing steel balls, and has a "v" shape. The bracket wraps around the top and two sides of the guide rail. In order to support the working components of the machine tool, a set of linear guides has at least four brackets. Used to support large working components, the number of brackets can exceed four. When the working parts of the machine tool move, the steel balls circulate in the groove of the support, distributing the wear of the support to each steel ball, thereby extending the service life of the linear guide rail. In order to eliminate the gap between the bracket and the guide rail, preloading can improve the stability of the guide rail system. The preloading is achieved by installing oversized steel balls between the guide rail and the bracket. The diameter tolerance of the steel ball is ± 20 microns, with increments of 0.5 microns. The steel balls are sorted and installed on the guide rail separately. The size of the preload depends on the force acting on the steel ball. If the force acting on the steel ball is too large and subjected to preloading for too long, resulting in increased resistance to the movement of the bracket, a balance problem will occur; In order to improve the sensitivity of the system and reduce motion resistance, it is necessary to reduce the preload accordingly. However, in order to improve motion accuracy and accuracy retention, sufficient preload negative numbers are required, which are contradictory aspects. If the working time is too long, the steel balls begin to wear out, and the preload acting on the steel balls begins to weaken, resulting in a decrease in the precision of the machine tool's working parts. If you want to maintain the initial accuracy, you must replace the guide rail bracket, or even replace the guide rail. If the guide rail system has already been preloaded. The system accuracy has been lost, the method is to replace the rolling elements. The design of the guide rail system strives for a large contact area between the fixed and moving components, which not only improves the system's load-bearing capacity, but also enables the system to withstand the impact force generated by intermittent cutting or gravity cutting, spreading the force widely and expanding the load-bearing area. In order to achieve this, there are various groove shapes for the guide rail system, with two representative ones. One is called Gothic (pointed arch), which is an extension of a semicircle with the contact point as the vertex; Another type is circular arc shape, which can also serve the same purpose. Regardless of the structural form, the goal is only one, to strive for more rolling steel ball radius to contact the guide rail (fixed element). The factor that determines the performance characteristics of the system is how the rolling elements contact the guide rail, which is the key to the problem.

HG Series,Linear Rails


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