Quality assurance of milling cutters—a contribution to multicomponent tolerancing

Abstract

This paper presents evaluation methods for the precision assessment of milling cutters. The geometric shapes of milling cutters comprise various revolving portions which may include: a cylindrical surface, a conical surface, a circular arc-type surface, a toroidal surface, a spherical head and/or other helicoidal surfaces. In actual operation, the shank of a milling cutter is held by the spindle head holder and rotated about an axis. The axis of the minimum enveloped shank can thus be used as the common central line of the entire tool surfaces. A heuristic approach is presented to model form errors for quality assessment on milling cutters using genetic algorithms (GAs). The proposed GA-based models systematically compute the exact turning envelopes of individual revolving surfaces separately, and then combined together, using the central line of the minimum enveloped shank as a common axis. Numerical examples are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed modelling approaches. The results indicate that the proposed models are simple, sensible and accurate for the quality assessment of various complicated cutters.