Improved positioning for side milling of ruled surfaces: Analysis of the rotation axis's influence on machining error

This article covers side milling of ruled surfaces using a milling cutter. Flank milling is useful for machining objects such as impellers, turbine blades, fan vanes and all workpieces defined by non-developable, ruled surfaces. In the present article, the influence of parameters defining improved positioning described in a previous study will be appraised. The general idea with improved positioning is to position the milling cutter at a tangent to the 2 directrices of the ruled surface while keeping a point of contact between the milling cutter and the rule considered. This is obtained by a rotation at a point about an imposed axis. Having defined calculation of error between the milled surface and the nominal surface, the influence of the point and the axis of rotation of improved positioning on error will be studied. From this, optimum improved positioning parameters allowing minimisation of error between the ruled surface and the milling cutter will be deduced.