Tool positioning method for achieving double-point contact in flank milling of a concave surface with a barrel cutter

Abstract

This paper presents a novel tool positioning method for flank milling with a barrel cutter. It can be used to compute the tool position, at which the cutter can contact with the surface at two points. The strip width of the tool position is larger than that of the tool position solved by the single-point offset method. An error distribution curve was used to describe the gap between a barrel cutter and a surface. This paper presented the existence of the tool position with double contact points through analyzing different types of error distribution curves. The cutter was lifted from the surface firstly, and then, the tool orientation was adjusted by changing the tilt angle and the yaw angle. The method presented was applied on a rule surface, a sculptured surface, and a pressure surface of a blade. The tool positions were analyzed to demonstrate the validity of our method. The computation and simulation results indicate that the double-point contact tool position can be solved by our method.