Abstract
Recently CAD/CAM systems is familiarized, and products design including the free-form surface came into wide use. Now a lot of tool-path patterns are proposed for milling process of free-form surface. Therefore, it is necessary to select an appropriate tool-path pattern according to the form of surface. For such reason, the selection of appropriate tool-path based on the form of surface represented by NURBS is studied. In this research, three tool-path generating methods, iso-parametric method, iso-planar method and constant scallop height method, were taken for comparison. A free-form surface was machined with three methods, and then the machined surfaces were measured. The difference between Z coordinates of the measured point and that of the target surface was defined as the error margin in order to evaluate performance of tool-path pattern. The results showed that proper selection of milling method would get the good surface integrity.
