The determination of instantaneous uncut chip thickness for non-uniform helix angle tools with complex tool path in ultrasonic milling process

Abstract

Ultrasonic milling is used more and more common in fields such as aerospace, mould and so on. Whereas, there are few literatures studying the ultrasonic milling. In consequence, focus on one of important skills for the ultrasonic milling process, instantaneous uncut chip thickness (IUCT) model for the cutter with non-uniform helix angle and complex toolpaths, is built and then a calculation theory is introduced to compute the IUCT using a numerical method. Subsequently, two examples of the toolpath are taken to show the validity of the presented method, the first one is the line toolpath and the second one is circle. The results is shown that the method in this paper can compute the IUCT values for the complex tool path, also, the method in this paper can be used by the cutter with non-uniform helix angles. [Submitted 19 December 2016; Accepted 24 October 2017]