Cusp error reduction under high speed micro/meso- scale milling with ultrasonic vibration assistance

Abstract

In the conventional use of vibration assisted machining, vibratory motion is mostly applied to the continuous machining processes such as turning where the cutting speed is much lower than the vibration speed. Even the recent articles on vibration assisted milling processes are also quite limited to low spindle speed less than 3k RPM. This study investigates vibration assistance that is applied to the workpiece in a high speed micro/meso-scale intermittent milling system where the cutting speed is much higher than the vibration speed. In addition to this, the vibration effect is analyzed considering feed and cross-feed directional application separately, which gives an idea of a right vibration assistance direction for surface quality improvement. To validate this, a one-directional ultrasonic vibration assisted milling system with ultrasonic frequency at 40 kHz and with amplitudes of a few microns is designed and its effect on the machined surface quality is investigated at high spindle RPMs over 15k. As a result, cusp heights are found to be reduced with ultrasonic vibratory motion of cutting edge in high cutting speed. Furthermore, the machined surface quality clearly tells that feed directional vibration assistance is able to generate better surface quality with reduced wavy burrs than cross-feed directional vibration assistance.