Ruled Surface Machining on Five-Axis CNC Machine Tools

To achieve high precision and high productivity in machining sculptured surfaces, a new architecture for a five-axis CNC interpolator for machining ruled surfaces was developed and demonstrated on a milling machine. The objective of the five-axis interpolator is to continuously maintain the milling cutter axis in parallel with the straight lines of the ruled surface. The cutter position and orientation are calculated at each sampling period of the interpolator, and corresponding axial position commands are generated by an inverse kinematics algorithm. This real-time approach produces precise surfaces and requires substantially less machining time compared to the conventional off-line approach. Two new gcodes are also given in this paper for the new interpolator to produce part surfaces in CNC milling machines.