Modeling and simulation of milling forces in milling plain woven carbon fiber-reinforced plastics

Abstract

Woven CFRP composites are increasingly applied in different industrial sectors. Excessive milling forces can involve some undesirable consequences such as rapid tool wear, surface burning, burrs, delamination, etc., during the milling of CFRP. Reasonably predicting force is of great significance to improve the machining quality and the tool life. A methodology is developed for predicting the milling forces by transforming specific cutting energies derived from the theoretical model of orthogonal cutting. In this methodology, the structural features of the plain-woven structure are carefully observed and analyzed. It is shown that all the average force coefficients regularly change with the rotation angle. The theoretical results applying these average force coefficients agree well with the measuring data. Furthermore, the maximal average of the cutting forces can be successfully predicted. All the average absolute values of relative errors between predictive and measured values of the cutting forces max-means are less than 10%. It is shown that the method applying the average force coefficients is capable of predicting the cutting forces in milling of plain-woven CFRP and over the entire range of rotation angles from 0 to 180°. The results can provide a reference for the prediction and the control of cutting forces in actual milling of plain-woven carbon fiber-reinforced plastics.