Development of a Web-Based Virtual Five-Axis Milling Toolpath Simulation System

Abstract

Virtual machine tool has been used in the toolpath simulation of a real machine tool with very promising achievement in teaching assistance. However, a five-axis milling machine is generally very expensive in comparison with traditional three-axis milling machine in its configuration. This is mostly resulted from the addition of two more rotational axes in five-axis machine. This paper focuses on the development of a Web-based five-axis milling machining toolpath simulation system so as to facilitate the comprehensive understanding of students and to ease the explanation of operations. A user can access the developed system through the web browsers such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chrome as long as the Java Runtime Environment and OpenGL are installed. Three general configurations of five-axis milling machine tool have been implemented including Head-Head, Head-Table, and Table-Table. Furthermore, five-axis post-processing is generally a bottleneck in the popularization of toolpath simulation. An intelligent distributed agent-based post-processor has been integrated in this system. For example, an APT file created by the usage of Catia CAD/CAM software according to a five-axis toolpath could be post-processed by the developed system for the generation of a five-axis NC program. This NC program could then be simulated in the proposed system. The developed system has been successfully implemented and shown very promising application in the understanding of five-axis milling operation.