NC machining of trimmed surfaces maintaining adjacent-surfaces integrity

In practical surface design, most of the surfaces are trimmed surfaces resu lting from Boolean manipulations. Avoiding damage to adjacent surfaces in t he generation of tool paths for their machining is a fundamental problem. T his paper presents an efficient method for representing and generating tool paths for the NC machining of trimmed surfaces considering this constraint . After 3D offsetting of surface contours, the method derives suitable tool paths from 2D pocket filling and then maps them onto the surface space eit her as isoparametric or iso-scallop patterns. As the method can deal effici ently with degenerate surfaces, it can be considered as a tool for CAM soft ware integration.