Abstract
In the mold machining, ball end cutter is usually used. Rather large cutter and very dense cutter path with small cutter feed are needed in using the ball end cutter for accurately finishing the mold surface, but they often cause long machining time and large remained material. In order to solve these problems, a new cutter with composite shape of round end cutter and ball end cutter is developed. In this paper, the authors proposed a cutter path computation method and milling simulation method for machining with this composite shape cutter. In the path generation and milling simulation, swept volume computation when the composite shape cutter moving along the line segment is important. The authors proposed a new algorithm of the swept volume computation. A path generation and simulation program is developed and some computational experiments are performed.
