Error compensation for sculptured surface productions by the application of control-surface strategy using predicted machining errors

In this paper, the principle and effectiveness of the control-surface strategy in machining-error compensation for end milling processes are studied Using this strategy, two new approaches, namely the direct compensation approach and the sensitivity function approach are proposed. When compared to existing approaches, there are two major improvements in the proposed approaches. First, machining errors caused by tool deflection are estimated from a developed surface generation model. This eliminates the time and costs required to design and conduct the actual machining experiments and dimensional inspections. Second the effectiveness of the proposed approaches is improved either by increasing the number of times the strategy is been used or by selecting the appropriate shifted distance based on the estimated machining-error curve. The effectiveness of the proposed error-compensation approaches is verified from simulations and experimental results for a 2D sculptured surface. By using computer aided design tool, this surface generation model can be easily applied to the problems in which the designed surfaces are complex 3D sculptured by considering more complicated chip geometry model. These proposed approaches can also be integrated into an integrated framework for machining path planning in which prediction and compensation of dimensional errors take place in the process development phase rather than in the manufacturing phase of the production cycle.