Development of Post-Processor and Cutting Motion Simulator for 5-axis CNC Laser Cutting Machine

Five-axis laser cutting has great advantages when it is applied to 3-dimensional machining requiring high cutting quality. For developing 5-axis CNC laser cutting systems, however, many problems such as rotating a laser head or a working table, 5-axis servo-control mechanism, tool path generation and post processing, and collision avoidance between a laser head and a work-piece should be solved. In this paper, we deal with developing a dedicated CAM system based on UG-NX3 for 5-axis laser cutting machine. Two essential modules such as post-processor and cutting motion simulation was developed. The developed system was applied to cutting curve defined on 3-D workpiece in order to show the validity of the proposed methods.