5-AXIS FREEFORM SURFACE MILLING USING PIECEWISE RULED SURFACE APPROXIMATION

This paper presents a 5-axis side milling scheme far freeform surfaces based an automatic piecewise ruled surface approximation. With this s cheme, resulting surface finish is accurate and pleasing and has a sma ller scallop height compared to ball-end milling. The ruled surface ap proximation cart be made arbitrarily precise resulting in art overall fast milling operation that satisfies tight tolerances, and smoother s urface finish. The class of surfaces that can take advantage of this t ype of 5-axis milling operation includes both convex and saddle-like ( hyperbolic) shapes.