Development of Integrated Roller Leveling System for Magnetic Encoding Medium Manufacturing

Magnetic linear encoder has been increasingly integrated in various position control system while demands for high precision machine tool to produce high precision products increase. During the manufacture of magnetic encoding medium, the medium is not expected to be flat due to packaging induced plastic deformation and residual stress. Medium deformation will result in damaging the performance of the medium such as the accuracy and magnetic flux density distribution. In this paper, the research efforts are devoted to develop a roller leveling system to flatten the curved magnetic medium, validated by parameter studies to investigate how roller leveling can be integrated into the manufacture of magnetic encoding medium in order to improve mechanical deflection and residual stress. The mechanical design of the roller leveling cycles has been completed. Experimental results demonstrate that roller leveling can significantly improve mechanical deflection of pre-stressed curve magnetic medium up to almost 60%.