Five-Axis NC Program Conversion for Inclined Plane Machining

Abstract

Machining processes on an inclined plane include mostly hole making, profiling, and pocketing. It comprises of 80% - 90% cutting process in five-axis machining and is therefore very important in multi-axis machining work. However, five-axis machining processes are normally difficult to introduce and to use because five-axis CAD/CAM and post-processor are normally demanded to generate five-axis NC program even though it is for the 2D contour machining on a plane with inclined angle. Therefore, this paper studies the inclined plane machining methods and extends traditional three-axis milling machining processes and methods so as to directly convert 2-1/2 and three-axis NC program into five-axis machining program to ease the application of five-axis machining processes. This study integrates the developed three-axis NC program interpreter, inclined plane coordinates transformation, and post-processor to simply the inclined plane NC programming. Two-dimensional NC program on a plane can be converted into five-axis NC program on the inclined-plane by the proposed methodology. Case study has been utilized to verify the utilization and correctness of the proposed methodology