Feedrate optimisation/scheduling on sculptured surface machining: a comprehensive review, applications and future directions

Free-form or sculptured surface milling is one of the continually used manufacturing processes for die/mould, aerospace (especially turbine blades), precision machine design, bio-medical devices and automotive industries. Developments of machining technologies for quality enhancement of machining results have become a very important fact in current real industry. Therefore, reducing milling time, tool wear, cutter deflection and improving surface texture quality and machining operations through adaptation and optimisation of tool feedrates based on changing surface geometry in sculptured surface machining is a great step in this direction. Various feedrate optimisation strategies have different feedrate rescheduling control parameters such as chip thickness, material removal rate (MRR), min(mrr,chip,force), max(expo.Acc/dec) and resultant forces. Some commercial CAM softwares come with MRR-based feedrate optimisation algorithms which have a very short calculation time. However, commercial feedrate scheduling systems have some limitations in generating the scheduled feedrates because they use the MRR or the cutting force model which is dependent on milling conditions. However, for the processes in which machining precision/accuracy is very important, it is inevitable that mechanistic force-based feedrate optimisation approaches, for which the calculation time is improved, will be integrated into commercial CAM software packages. Here, developing only the mechanistic cutting force-based algorithm is not enough. In this paper, improvement and optimisation of machining feedrate value, which is one of the cutting parameters which has a tremendous effect on the precise machining of free-form surfaces, was discussed by using the virtual machining framework. For this purpose, the boundary representation solid modelling technique-based free-form milling simulation and feedrate optimisation system integrated with commercial CAD/CAM software is developed for three-axis ball-end milling. This review study includes the information regarding the following topics: The algorithms developed for the feedrate value optimisation, MRR calculation approaches, cutting force computation methods, details of algorithms, the effects on the surface accuracy, the effects on the machining time, the capabilities of the present commercial CAM software packages, the encountered difficulties and overcoming those difficulties, recent developments and future research directions.