Optimising positioning of the axis of a milling cutter on an offset surface by geometric error minimisation

This article covers side milling of ruled surfaces using a milling cutter. Flank milling is useful for machining objects such as impellers, turbine blades, fan vanes and all workpieces defined by nondevelopable ruled surfaces. In the present article, we first introduce a new approach to positioning for side milling of ruled surfaces. The reasoning adopted is based on improved positioning as developed within the Toulouse Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. Having defined the offset surface of a ruled surface, we shall study various positionings of the milling cutter’s axis on this offset surface. We shall then perform a comparative study into geometrics errors caused by these different positionings, before going on to propose error processing by adopting various criteria for minimisation that will then be subjected to comparison.

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