Determination of Cutter Orientation for Five-Axis Sculptured Surface Machining with a Filleted-End Cutter

In this paper, an accurate and efficient method is proposed for determining filleted-end cutter orientation based on surface analysis. With this method, the surface geometry is first analysed and classified according to its shape. Different kinds of surface shape require different treatments with regard to cutter orientation, so that the local geometry of the filleted-end cutter is matched with that of the surface as closely as possible without gouging the surface in the local region of the cutter contact points. The proposed method has been successfully implemented using the visual C ++ language and the ACIS geometric modeller. Finally, some illustrative examples are given. ID="A1"Correspondance and offprint requests to: Dr T. Chen, CAD Centre, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, PR China. E-mail: tc29@chinese.com