Prediction of stability limit for multi-regenerative chatter in high performance milling

Abstract

Chatter is one of the most important factors that inhibit the improvement of productivity and deteriorate the machined surface quality in milling process. In order to obtain good surface quality, classical machining process usually has to take conservative milling parameters. Based on the authors’ previous work, this paper presented a new third-order discretization method to compute the stability lobes considering multi-regenerative chatter effect. A mathematical model, which is suitable for the dynamic system with non-uniform pitch cutter or cutter run-out, is first established for multi-regenerative chatter. Then, three examples are performed to test the validity of the proposed method. The first example is for the case that the system takes a non-uniform pitch cutter. In the second example, after the modal parameters, run-out parameters and cutting force parameters are gained from experiments, the stability lobes are predicted using the proposed method and subsequently testified by a series of experiments. The third example is for the case of existing cutter run-out. The final computation and experiment results indicate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed method. It is applicable in high performance machining for achieving a good parameter combination.