Investigation of the effects of axial ultrasonic vibrations on chatter stability in milling with bull nose cutters

Abstract

Ultrasonic vibrations-assisted machining has positive effects on the chatter stability and surface integrity of the process. Radial vibration-assisted milling is effective but it needs an advanced control of vibration trajectory hence is not easy to implement. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of axial ultrasonic vibrations on stability through disturbing the chip regeneration. A simple way of predicting the stability increase is proposed using missed-cut effect that reduces the effective number of teeth in cut. The axial vibrations are shown to introduce radial runout such that a regular cutter will show the characteristics of a serrated tool. For a 2-tooth bull nose cutter, the proposed method was verified by milling of Ti-6Al-4V material. The results showed that the axial ultrasonic vibrations increased limit axial depth of cut by more than 40%. Therefore, applying axial vibrations would be a simple solution to improve chatter resistance in machining difficult-to-cut materials while avoiding the cost and complexity of serrated rounded edges. The attention on using axial ultrasonic vibrations in milling is increasing, hence further research on modelling the machining dynamics combined with the velocity effects will be needed following this study.