Research on the contact-impact between balls and re-circulating mechanism using the multibody dynamics simulation

The re-circulating mechanism of ball screws plays a vital role for its providing the path for steel balls rolling in screw grooves generally in high-speed/high-precision ball screw transmitting systems. However it is very hard to directly measure the ball's motion in the re-circulation for the closed recirculation groove. In order to investigate the impact-contact between the balls and re-circulating mechanism, a multibody dynamics model by using ADAMS is used to simulate the balls/re-circulating contact-impact behavior in ball screw mechanism. In the multibody simulation, a general elastic model for contact model was used. The influences of the contact stiffness and rotational speed of the screw, the velocity and torque of the ball screw mechanism are investigated in detail. From the obtained results, it is found that contact stiffness between the ball and re-circulating mechanism has more great effect on the above parameters. The study provides a method and useful datum for further improving the ball screw mechanism.