The Optimal Cutter Length Determining for Fixed 5-Axis Milling

Abstract

Fixed 5-axis milling machining has been the most preferred method in fabricating dies and molds with very deep shapes. In the process planning of such machining, determining of the cutter length is a time consuming task. In this paper, an algorithm for automatically determining the optimal cutter length for the fixed 5-axis milling operation is proposed. The optimal length can be derived by computing the distance between the cutter location points and an offset shape of the workpiece by the inverted zero-length cutter. These computations of the offset shape can be accelerated by using the depth buffer mechanism of GPU which is now installed on most PCs. An experimental system is implemented and some computational experiments are performed.