Abstract
Manufacturing industry tends to high-mix low-volume production in recent years. In the field of machining, it is strongly required to develop a computer aided process planning (CAPP) system to shorten the preparation time. On the other hand, it is expected that more efficient and rough machining would be achieved by 5-axis indexing that effectively utilizes the flexibility of the tool posture of 5-axis machine tools. However, it is difficult to automatically determine the tool postures to remove the unmachined area during a rough machining operation. Therefore, this study aims to establish a determination method of suitable tool postures according to the directions detected based on machining primitives that are divided from the removal area. According to the unmachined area, plural tool postures are allocated to the original machining primitive and respective machining feature is recognized for process planning. A case study is
conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed method to improve the efficiency of a rough machining operation.
