Study on Virtual Machining Process of Peripheral Milling of Thin-Walled Workpiece

Abstract

Thin-walled workpiece is easy to deform in machining. In order to predict the dimensional error of machined surface of thin-walled workpiece, computer simulation technology is studied, which is called virtual machining process. For the simulation of workpiece deformation, much numerical analysis should be done. Research indicates using FEA (Finite Element Analysis) in each step of simulation process needs too much time to meet the requirements of industrial application. Therefore it is important to decrease the simulation time. In this paper, a new method is proposed to realize rapid analysis of workpiece deflection in virtual machining process, which combines rapid analytical solution method with a few times of accurate FEA, thus greatly decreases the time required for whole simulation. For the simulation, several peripheral milling process models are presented with increasing order of sophistication and accuracy, which can be applied to simulate cutting process with the effect of workpiece deformation caused by cutting force. In the final section, the comparison between simulation results and experiments shows the proposed methods and models can closely predict dimensional error and texture of machined surface of flexible workpiece.