Moving Electric Arc Milling System Development And Machining Experiment

As the market demand becomes more and more volatile, products tend to have shorter lifetime. To the die and mould manufacturing companies, this usually means shorter delivering time. However, complicated die and moulds especially those with cavities are usually made by traditional EDM machines which are characterized by very low machining efficiency. This greatly restricts the application of EDM process in die and mould manufacturing.To solve the efficiency problem of the traditional EDM process, a novel machining method which changes the intermittent and point-by-point material removal mechanism of traditional EDM process has been proposed. In this machining method, moving electric arcs generated between the rapidly rotating copper electrode and the work piece are utilized to remove material from the work piece. As the electric arc keeps moving rapidly while burning, no discharge concentration will occur on the track of the moving arc, while on the other hand, material removal process will never be interrupted by any discharge intervals. Thus the material removal process becomes continuous and more efficient.All the work done in this research was aimed at establishing a machining system for moving electric arc milling, which contains the following contents:1. Development of the functional components for moving electric arc milling. This is described in detail in chapter 2, including the designing of a especial spindle for moving arc milling, the flushing system and the power supply.2. Development of the CNC system for moving arc milling. This is described in chapter 3 and chapter 4. The CNC system for moving electric arc milling includes the lower-level control system and the upper-level control system. The former is responsible for the real-time task such as interpolation, position control, velocity control and so on and he latter for the non-real-time task such as GUI interface management, NC file management and so on.3. Investigation of the characteristics of the moving electric arc milling. This is introduced in chapter 5. Firstly, systematic comparison had been made between the moving electric arc milling and the traditional EDM process. Then moving electric arc milling experiment has been done under different machining parameters to further investigate the characteristics of the moving arc milling.