Flank Milling Surface Design with the Least Square Approach

Typically flank milling is used to machine ruled surfaces. In this paper, a method of designing doubly curved NURBS surfaces for flank milling using the least squares method is given. In this method, grazing points generated by the Bedi et al. (4) tool positioning method are used as sample points. The user defines the degree and the number of control points along two parametric directions of the surface. A NURBS surface is then fit to pass among the sample points using the least square technique (10, 11). Accuracy of the surface is evaluated by the parametric error measurement method (12) and is controlled by increasing the number of control points. Surfaces that can be machined with great accuracy are generated. Examples are given to demonstrate this surface design method.