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Efficient trochoidal milling based on medial axis transformation and inscribed ellipse

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Abstract

Trochoidal milling is a promising strategy for machining pockets with difficult-to-cut materials. Conventional trochoidal toolpath is composed of a set of circular curves and transition curves. However, the actual radial cutting width has a large variation along processing path due to geometric features of inscribed circles, which results in large fluctuation of cutting width and low material removal rate. In this paper, a new trochoidal toolpath based on elliptical curve is proposed to overcome the mentioned drawbacks. Medial axis transformation is adopted to represent the 2D pocket geometry. An algorithm is developed to determine a sequence of inscribed ellipses according to pre-defined machining parameters. Hermit curve is utilized to generate the transition curves between two adjacent elliptical curves. The overall toolpath length is significantly reduced. Machining experiments are conducted to validate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method. The experimental results showed an improvement of 12.7% in machining efficiency without increasing the maximum cutting force, compared with conventional trochoidal toolpath.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51705374), the Open Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing and Equipment Technology, HUST (No. DMETKF2019019), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2019T120683).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hubei Key Laboratory of Waterjet Theory and New Technology, School of Power and Mechanical Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Xi Huang, Shijing Wu, Liang Liang & Xiaoyong Li

  2. State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing and Equipment Technology, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Xi Huang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Nuodi Huang

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  1. Xi Huang
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  2. Shijing Wu
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  3. Liang Liang
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  4. Xiaoyong Li
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  5. Nuodi Huang
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Correspondence to Nuodi Huang.

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Huang, X., Wu, S., Liang, L. et al. Efficient trochoidal milling based on medial axis transformation and inscribed ellipse. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 111, 1069–1076 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-020-06172-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-020-06172-2

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