Hits:

Indexed by:期刊论文

Date of Publication:2013-08-01

Journal:INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

Included Journals:SCIE、EI、Scopus

Volume:67

Issue:9-12

Page Number:2489-2500

ISSN No.:0268-3768

Key Words:Pocket machining; Spiral tool path; Mesh mapping; HSM; Milling

Abstract:Almost 80 % of the milling operations to produce mechanical parts are produced by NC pocket milling, especially in aerospace and automobile industry. At present, for 2.5D pocket machining, direction-parallel and contour-parallel machining strategies have gained nearly universal acceptance. However, in such tool path, abrupt change of path direction, frequent acceleration and deceleration, and sharp velocity discontinuous are found to significantly limit the machining efficiency of pockets. To address these problems, this paper introduces a method for generating a spiral tool path that maintains a steady-state cutting process by as smoothly as possible curvature evolution of the tool path for pocket machining. First, the machined region of a layer of a pocket is mapped onto a circular domain by means of mesh mapping, which reduces the task of tool path generation from the geometrically complex pocket region to a topologically simple disk. On this disk, a guide spiral is constructed according to a mathematical function constrained by the calculated path interval map. Using the mapping from the pocket to the disk as a guide, the guide spiral is inversely mapped into the interior of the pocket and then a smooth low-curvature spiral path is derived. The generated tool paths are guaranteed to not inherit any corners in the subsequent interior tool paths and allows cutting of the pocket without tool retractions during the cutting operations. Finally, the proposed method is implemented and tested on several typical sample pockets to demonstrate its validity and significance.