A Comparison of Two Methods for Geometric Milling Simulation Accelerated by GPU

Abstract

For detecting potential problems of a cutter path, cutting force simulation in the NC milling process is necessary prior to actual machining. A milling operation is geometrically equivalent to a Boolean subtraction of the swept volume of a cutter moving along a path from a solid model representing the stock shape. In order to precisely estimate the cutting force, the subtraction operation must be executed for every small motion of the cutter. By using GPU, the required time for the subtraction can be drastically reduced. In this paper, the computation speed of two known GPU accelerated geometric milling simulation methods, which are the depth buffer based method and the parallel processing based method with CUDA language, are compared. Computational experiments show that the implementation with CUDA is several times faster than the depth buffer based method when the cutter motion in the simulation process is sufficiently small.