Thin-walled parts are widely used in aeronautical

aerospace and automotive applications due to their high performance-to-weight ratio. The thin walls in these parts also lead to low rigidity during machining

making them susceptible to deformation under the influence of the cutting force and/or the clamping force. As a result of spring-back effect after machining

significant machining error occurs in the thin-walled workpiece in its stress-free state. Analytical solution and FEM analysis of the deformation phenomenon are not robust against various machining conditions. To address this issue

a comprehensive error compensation scheme is proposed to predict and compensate for three major error sources

i.e. geometric error

thermal error

and force-induced error. The geometric and thermal errors of the machine tool are modeled and compensated to provide high motion precision for on-machine measurement. The force-induced error is obtained using on-machine measurement data. Comprehensive compensation of all three error sources is achieved by transforming individual compensation values into the same coordinate system. A real-time compensation system is developed based on the numerical control system of the machine tool. Compensation experiments carried out on two types of thin-walled parts show (i) a reduction of machining errors by at least 74% and (ii) an improvement of machining productivity by at least 41%

which validates the proposed compensation scheme.