A geometric representation for the real-time simulation of NC machining processes

In this paper we present a level-based representation used in the implementation of a real-time material removal simulator, whose principal feature is to be embedded into a commercial NC machine where the hardware capabilities are limited. The representation and its supporting architecture is used for the generation of an interactive simulation of the actual machined part taking as input the NC machine feedback with the following features: i) The virtual and real simulations must be synchronized, ii) the internal representation of the objects must be as exact and accurate as possible and iii) the graphical quality should be acceptable, even with low graphics hardware resources. The mentioned representation was implemented in the frame of a research project, allowing the evaluation of the architecture with some results presented in this paper. The results confirm the hypothesis that the current implementation simulates low and medium complexity models synchronously. More complex models require some tuning of the simulation parameters in order to be correctly simulated.