Optimal Tools Selection for Rough Machining of Freeform Cavities Using Cavity Decomposition.

Document Type : Research Studies

Authors

1 Professor of Production Engineering, Mansoura University

2 Assistant Professor of Production Engineering, Mansoura University

3 Demonstrator of Production Engineering, Mansoura University

Abstract

Tools selection is very important stage in production process-planning and has great impact on the machining time and cost. It is difficult for the part programmer to determine the optimal set of tools that achieve the minimum machining cost. Optimal tools selection is a difficult problem due to large number of tools’ combinations and particularly for complex machining features. Some researchers determined the tools sequence by computing each tool accessible volume, however this may not lead to the optimal sequence since they neglect the technological aspects of tool paths. Other research works determined the tools sequence by computing tool paths in more accurate way but it consumed more CPU time. This paper introduces a new and efficient method to find the optimal tools sequence for rough machining of freeform cavities based on tool paths’computationsand cavity decomposition. The newly introduced method saves a lot of complex geometric computations and is more numerically robust than previous methods. The proposed method has been validated against commercial CAM software for correctness and reliability. Computational results show that the proposed method improves the previous method in CPU time by about 30 to 50 %.

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