Abstract
Despite the inbuilt advantages offered by five-axis machining, the manufacturing industry has not widely adopted this technology due to the high cost of machines and insufficient support from CAD/CAM systems. Companies are used to three-axis machining and their shop floors are not yet ready for five-axis machining in terms of training and programming. The objective of this research is to develop and implement a machining technique that uses the simplicity of three-axis tool positioning and the flexibility of five-axis tool orientation, to machine sculptured surfaces. This technique, \(3\frac{1}{2}\frac{1}{2}\)-axis, divides a sculptured surface into patches and then machines each patch using a fixed tool orientation. This paper presents the surface partitioning scheme and the method of selecting an optimum number of sub-divisions along with actual machining experiments. For the example surface utilized in this study, the proposed hybrid method led to shorter machining time compared to traditional three-axis machining and comparable to simultaneous five-axis machining .
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Roman, A., Bedi, S. & Ismail, F. Three-half and half-axis patch-by-patch NC machining of sculptured surfaces. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 29, 524–531 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-005-2553-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-005-2553-9