Geometric error compensation for five-axis ball-end milling by considering machined surface textures

Arbitrarily adjusting tool poses during error compensation may affect the quality of surface textures. This paper presents one tool center limitation-based geometric error compensation for five-axis ball-end milling to avoid the unexpected machined textures. Firstly, the mechanism of cutter location generation with cuter contact (CC) trajectory is analyzed. Due to zero bottom radius of ball-end cutter, CC points of the surface are only related to the tool center of the cutter. Realizing that, tool center limitation method of ball-end milling is established based on the generation of movements of all axes in order to ensure the machined textures. Then, geometric error compensation of ball-end milling is expressed as optimizing rotation angles of rotary axes by limiting tool centers of cutter locations. Next, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is intergraded into the geometric error compensation to obtain the compensated numerical control (NC) code. The limited region for particles of rotation angles is established, and moving criterion with a mutation operation is presented. With the help of the tool center limitation method, fitnesses of all particles are calculated with the integrated geometric error model. In this way, surface textures are considered and geometric errors of the machine tool are reduced. At last, cutting experiments on five-axis ball-end milling are carried out to testify the effectiveness of the proposed geometric error compensation.