Side Mill Tool Profiling for Generation of Helical Surfaces Determined by Reverse Engineering

Abstract

The compressor rotors usually are helical surfaces with constant pitch and are composed crossing profiles. Frequently, for repair operations occurs the reconstruction necessity for one or both of the worms, drive and driven, from the helical compressors gear. The helical composed surface of rotor flank is generated usually with side mill. The knowledge of worm shape can not be made from geometrical conditions. In these conditions it is necessary to determine the flank form by actual measuring the crossing profiles of these parts. So, the theoretical helical surface of the worm is being substituted by an assembly of helical lines which together with crossing profiles forms points cloud resulted from measuring leads to a polyhedral expression of the flank rotor. Numerically, this surface type is expressed by a coordinate array which shows its discrete image. The profiling of cutting tool bounded by a revolution surface reciprocally enveloping with the substitutive surface of the helical one represents a special problem. In this paper is proposed an algorithm for polyhedral expression of the helical surface previously determined by reverse engineering methods and an algorithm for the determination of the specific enveloping condition at contact with a discrete surface.It is presented an example for a compressor rotor measured on a 3D measuring machine, the algorithm for the transformation of the gathered points cloud in a surface with polyhedral expression. Given these conditions there were determined the enveloping condition and the axial section of the side mill.