Improving the machining accuracy of thin-walled parts by online measuring and allowance compensation

Thin-walled parts are important structural parts in the aerospace industry. Two common problems encountered in milling are workpiece deformation and tool wear, mainly due to the low rigidity of thin-walled structures and the poor machinability of difficult-to-cut materials. In this paper, we propose a novel online measuring and allowance compensation method that can be applied to thin-walled parts to improve machining accuracy. Automatic on-machine inspection is used to measure a workpiece after rough/semi-finishing without transferring and reclamping the workpiece. Then, a compensation value is calculated to adaptively adjust the depth of cutting during finishing. The method does not require complex cutting force modeling or nonlinear calculation of workpiece-tool deflection and avoids the uneconomical monitoring of the cutting force, power, and torque of the machine and cutting tools and can be extended to engineering applications easily. Its effectiveness and adaptability is demonstrated by an orthogonal experiment in which the structure, cutting depth, and material are considered.