Introduction

Sculptured surfaces

Sculptured Surfaces have applications in a variety of industries such as the automotive, aerospace and
naval architecture as well as prosthetics in medicine. For example, dies and molds used in extrusion
and forging processes are commonly designed with sculptured surfaces to control deformation of
material and to meet other product and manufacturing requirements; Turbine and pump blades as
well as propellers must have particular aerofoil sections to match aerodynamical operating conditions.
In response to ever-increasing demand for high performance and aesthetics of products, new and
more geometrically complex classes of sculptured surfaces are used in product design with more and
more stringent requirements for accuracy and surface finish. This combination of higher geometric
complexity and greater accuracy presents new challenges to machining operations for product
manufacture.

These need of sculptured surface has developed the sculpture tool machining. Sculpture tool
machining is an advance manufacturing technique and an innovative developing trend in
Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) that deals with the high quality surface machining and smooth
finishing of raw material.

Tool Path

When we talk about the high quality surface finishing, the tool and its movement become much
important as any imperfection over surface is highly undesirable. In 5-axis high speed milling, one of
the key requirements to ensure the quality of the machined surface is that the tool-path must be
smooth, i.e. the posture change from one point to the next must be minimized. Five-axis milling is
widely used in sculptured surface machining, such as turbine blades, propellers, 3D moulds and dies.
With two more degrees of freedom than 3-axis machines, the 5-axis mode allows simultaneously
change of cutter position and orientation to match the part surface, and thus offers many advantages
such as better cutter accessibility, setup process reduction, fast material removal rates and improved
surface finish. To make the best use of 5-axis machining, however, problems related to complication
and complexity from the two additional rotary axes have to be solved. One of the challenging tasks is
to automatically generate error-free tool-path without user-interaction for machining sculptured
surfaces.

Current practice in CAD/CAM of dies, molds and other sculpture-surfaced products separates the
process of geometric shape design of sculptured surfaces from that of NC tool-path generation. The
CAD models of the surfaces are usually defined in parametric forms using Bazier, Bspline and NURBS
(Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) surfaces. Tool paths for three or five-axis machining are then
generated afterwards from the surface models. This approach works well for 3-axis machining and has
recently been extended 5-axis machining with only limited success due to the difficulty in generating
accurate and gouge-free 5-axis tool paths from given CAD models.

Methods of Tool Path Generation

Method – 1

The tool interference is the over-cut phenomenon and under-cut phenomenon during the processing
of parts by tool. Tool interference is usually divided into two types: local interference and global
interference.

Local interference refers to the tool size or position does not fit cause the tool to cut the part to be
machined surfaces should not be removed; When the tool radius of curvature greater than the surface
radius of curvature of the workpiece material was over cut or under cut. The occurrence of these local
interference is mainly caused by the tool radius of curvature greater than the radius of curvature of
the machined surface. Therefore, the choice of tool radius should be determined by the curvature of
the surface to be machined.

Global interference is the tool or fixture collision with the workpiece or fixtures. Global interference
checking on the surface of discrete sampling, and then calculate the distance of the sampling point
and the tool axis, if the distance is less than the tool radius, the judgment of the collision.
Now, the tool path generation methodology incorporates interference detection and optimal tool
selection for machining free-form surfaces on 3-axis CNC machines using ball-end cutters. In this
method, the global and local interference is first detected and prevented, and then the optimal tools
in terms of machining time are selected and tool paths are generated.

Method – 2

This approach for the determination of efficient tool paths in the machining of sculptured surfaces
using 3-axis ball-end milling. The objective is to keep the scallop height constant across the machined
surface such that redundant tool paths are minimized. Unlike most previous studies on constant
scallop-height machining, the present work determines the tool paths without resorting to the
approximated 2D representations of the 3D cutting geometry. Two offset surfaces of the design
surface, the scallop surface and the tool center surface, are employed to successively establish scallop
curves on the scallop surface and cutter location tool paths for the design surface.

Method – 3

In this technique, an optimization approach to generate high surface quality tool-path is used. The
overall procedure involves two steps. In the first step, an initial tool-path is generated. In the second
step, the adjacent tool-paths are generated in an iterative manner, one at a time, until the whole
surface is covered.

Initial tool-path generation: As is known to all, the smaller the posture change rate , the higher the
surface quality. Posture change rate Ri is defined as

Pi represents of the CC point, and Vi represents of the unit vector of cutter axis along its posture. The
path interval refers to the distance between adjacent CC points. Suppose ε is the scallop height error,
and ρ is the radius of normal curvature, discrete boundary curve from the known CC-point demand at
the point when the next CC point to approximate NURBS curve with the arc, the path interval between
the two CC points is

We choose an arbitrary boundary point as the initial point, and at any CC point ,we define the direction
of Pi-1 to Pi as the feed direction. In the feed direction of ±30 °, we offer a series of sampling points
with no interference, and calculate the corresponding posture change rate. We choose the smallest
posture change rate point P’, and set new feed direction as Pi to P’. At last ,we can find Pi+1 at the
feed direction by the use of the path interval and get the initial tool path which is shown in in Fig.
Adjacent tool-path generation: The generation of the adjacent path to the current path involves two
steps. In the first step, the CC points of the adjacent path are generated by the initial tool path with
the calculation of the offset distance one by one until cover the entire surface. The offset distance
refers to the adjacent CC point distance between the contact path, Its size affect the processing
efficiency and quality. Trajectory generation algorithm such as the residual height of each row and no
fixed line spacing, each of its points are based on a track before the track on the line corresponding to
the location of points to be based on the maximum residual height bias, so we can guarantee to
generate the trajectory points satisfy limit the maximum residual error, but also on this basis to
achieve maximum processing efficiency, bringing the total pathlength of the shortest processing.
While processing the different surfaces, different formula for calculating the Offset distance is
different, details are as follows: If the processing surfaces is the plane and the cutter is the ball-end
cutter. For a given cutter radius r, and the scallop height h on a flat surface, the path interval L is simply
expressed as

In actual processing, r is much smaller than h, so the above equation can be approximated as

Similarly, when the processing surface is convex surfaces and concave surfaces, the path interval L is
simply expressed as

However, sometimes, curvature changes in surface is too severe that the adjacent tool path is not
smooth enough. Heuristic-based algorithms are proposed to solve the problem. The algorithm set the
minimum feed direction changes α, if △ α is greater than the minimum feed direction changes，
eliminate the old point and replaced with a new point. Do it in an iterative manner, one at a time, until
the whole tool path is checked. Therefore, the machining path smoothing processing is not only to
maintain consistency between the tool-path, but also makes the processing tool-path smooth. as
shown in Figure.
Method – 4

In 5-axis finish milling of sculptured surfaces, a larger cutter yields high efficiency but may cause
interference (gouging and collision), while a smaller cutter results in no interference but needs longer
tool path and machining time. For a given sculptured surface, the ideal solution is to use large cutters
to finish the convex and flat areas and small cutters to finish the critical concave areas. However, most
currently commercially available CAM systems require the user to select appropriate cutters. In
practice, the user has to follow a trial-and-error approach, i.e., selecting a cutter and generating tool
paths to see whether the cutter is feasible, which is very time consuming. When multiple cutters are
required, it is nearly impossible for a user to determine what may constitute an optimal cutter
combination for a given surface. Therefore, it is very much desirable to develop a computerised tool
to conduct the cutter selection task automatically.

Over the years, there has been no lack of effort on multi-cutter selection for milling operations.
However, little has been reported for 5-axis milling of sculptured surfaces. A surface decomposition
algorithm for multi-cutter machining in both 3-axis and 5-axis modes with flat-end tool for flat regions
and ball-end tools for others. However, there is a lack of algorithm details for automatic selection of
cutter sizes. The main limitation of these reported methods is that they follow a trial-and-error
procedure, i.e., the feasibility of a cutter is evaluated in tool-path generation. This may lead to two
problems: time consuming and conservative selection.