Tool path planning for five-axis flank milling of free-form surfaces

Flank milling is an efficient process to remove materials from free-form billet. In conventional, its path generation addressed the approximation error between the ruled surface and free-form to-be-cut surface. Different from reducing the approximation error as much as possible, the error between the machined surface and the design surface is addressed in this paper. The machine tool kinematics is introduced into the establishment of the instantaneous engagement. The complex spatial engagements are represented on a group of planes. In order to ensure that the machined surface is valid, the instantaneous engagements are limited in the tolerance band. To improve the efficiency, the machining region of each path is increased as much as possible by adjusting the contact points and tool orientations. Therefore, an optimization model to generate a milling path is established and solved by the particle swarm optimization algorithm. At last, the proposed method is verified on a compressor blade.