Research On NC Grinding Technology Of Ball-end Mill

With the development of modern manufacturing technology, the shape of tools for manufacturing become more complex. The improving of tool structure result in increasingly complex of curve of cutting edge, and make the manufacturing of cutting tools more difficult. Ball-end mill is widely used in aerospace, shipbuilding, turbine machinery manufacturing and many other fields. However, in our country, the fabrication of high quality ball-end mill still mainly depends on the imported equipment and NC programming software. Core technology of ball-end mill manufacturing is the algorithm of process, it is embodied in the NC programming,which includes three points: the mathematical model, algorithms for tool path calculation and algorithm optimization. This paper studied the algorithm of process and NC programming, which based on the five axis CNC tool grinder developed by Harbin Measuring & Cutting Tool Group.Firstly, research on the cutter location algorithm of ball-end mill grinding. According to the definition of the structure parameters of ball end milling cutter and the method of moving coordinate system, boundary curves and the normal vector was studied. Then analyzed the ball-end mill manufacturing process and the grinding wheel for each process, which was used to calculate the tool path with a new method. The new method combines the” grinding surface normal tracking” and ”cutting edge curve point tracking”.Then, the NC programming software of ball-end mill has been developed by using Studio Visual C#. The software interface was built by Blend Design. Using Access database to store data, modify data, and data call. Writing NC code generation algorithm with C # and MATLAB mixed programming.Finally, after running the software, NC code was got. Then, analyzed the simulation results and measured the simulation results in VERICUT. And with the results of the analysis, optimization algorithm of NC programming was obtained.