Flank milling of a ruled surface with conical tools—an optimization approach

Abstract

In this paper, machining a ruled surface with a conical tool is discussed. The main goal of our method (the spatial tangent points shift method) is to minimize the error between the given surface and the machined surface. A three-step-optimization is applied. In each step, the cutting tool is tangential to two guiding rails. The guiding rails can be located anywhere within the ruled surface. The first step is to initialize the tool position and find the point with the biggest deviation; the second step tries to minimize the surface error by moving the guiding rails towards the point with the largest deviation along the ruling line, which reduces the surface error to nearly half of its original value; the third step is to shift the tool position along the feed direction to further reduce the error between the given surface and the machined surface. We test the effect of various tool parameters on our method, and we compare our method to other methods of milling with a conical tool. Finally, we used our method to machine a test part and the accuracy of the assessment was verified experimentally.