Numerical control machining of triangulated sculptured surfaces in a stereo lithography format with a generalized cutter

Abstract

A unified approach to the generation of numerical control tool paths for triangulated sculptured surfaces in a stereo lithography format using a generalized cutter is presented. This is important because the use of a stereo lithography format for representing a computer-aided design model has been widely accepted in industry for quite some time. It is not only just because of an application such as rapid prototyping (RP), which specifically requires the use of it, but also it is due to the fact that complex stereo lithography models can now be created directly by the digitization and reverse engineering process. Although many computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing software systems support the translator of stereo lithography files, only a few papers have addressed the issue of numerical control machining directly from a stereo lithography file. A general computing algorithm to generate tool paths by using a generalized automatically programmed tools cutter is presented. It is general in the sense that it can be applied to various cutters including ball, flat and fillet end-mills. To reduce the computation time, an efficient method for the region query of a tessellated mesh is also presented. Simulations as well as real machining examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.