Application of Multi-Point Contact Machining to Convex Sculptured Surface

To improve the current situation that multi-point contact machining has mostly been for concave sculptured surface,a strategy for general convex sculptured surface,taking a cover car convex surface as the instance,is proposed.The model of the convex surface from the scattered point clouds is reconstructed.Then the tool position error distribution for different path direction with rotary method is analyzed,and the relationship between the key parameters in rotary method and the tool position error distribution is also discussed.The results show that the condition for multi-point contact of the general convex surface is to make the toroidal cutter feed along the maximum direction of curvature of the convex surface,which gets completely opposite to the concave surface.The simulation and machining experiment show that the multi-point contact theory can heighten the machining efficiency to 2.3 times of that by UG algorithm for convex sculptured surface machining.