Applications Of Multi-thread Parallel Processing In Five-axis NC Simulation

NC simulation technique occupies an important position in the process of production designing and manufacturing in modern industry field. At the same time, it has become an indispensability of CAD/CAM. With this method, it can confirm the NC program is correct or not and simulate the recurrence of milling process realistically. Comparing with the traditional testing cut method, NC simulation can save a great deal of resources and shorten the productions' developing time.A new form of 5-axis NC milling simulation system, based on the compressed voxel model, is developed by the cooperations of Northwestern Polytechnical University and Technical University of Berlin. The system uses the compressed voxel model to construct virtual tool swept volume and workpiece model. It can also have the functions to analyze the dynamical milling process, calculate the amount of workpiece's cutting and optimize the NC program.Because of the tremendous amount of data and the large scale of calculation during the voxel based NC simulation process, it causes the low display velocity and poor real-time efficiency. In order to improve these impressions, we introduce the parallel processing.According to our current computer hardware, this paper studies the parallel structions, algorithms and program methods respectively and introduces the multi-threads parallel processing method into our compressed voxel model basement 5-axis NC simulation system. This paper also analyzes the discreting process of swept volumes and presentes the corresponding parallel algorithm. At last, an instance proves the algorithm has a good speedup in a workstation with two CPUs system.