Model for surface topography prediction in mirror-milling of aircraft skin parts

Abstract

As a new technology of aircraft skin processing, mirror-milling is an efficient and green processing technology, which is a gradually developmental substitute for chemical milling. The purpose of this research aims to study surface topography forming mechanism and the effect of support location on the surface topography forming in mirror-milling of aircraft skin parts. A new iterative workpiece deformation prediction model is proposed for mirror-milling error prediction of low-rigidity parts. In addition, the workpiece surface topographies are predicted and verified at different support locations. The results of the study are summarized: under the same processing parameters, the machined surface topographies with different characteristics are obtained only by changing the relative position between the support head and the milling head. The support location is the key parameter of reducing the workpiece deformation error.