Assessment of sculptured surface milling strategies using design of experiments

Product manufacturing on CNC milling machine tools involves a number of machining parameters and tool geometries. In the case of sculptured or free-form surfaces the number of these parameters can be significantly large and vary according to surface complexity. Minimising the number of parameters is carried out through statistical elimination. Design of experiments (DoE) along with the respective statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) constitutes a low-cost useful tool in determining sub-optimum values for all parameters involved in each milling strategy as well as the most significant of those parameters. DoE was implemented for a particular sculptured surface assessing a variety of roughing and finishing strategies of a CAM simulation software.