Developing a Postprocssor for Three Types of Five-AxisMachine Tools-外文文献.docVIP

Developing a Postprocessor for Three Types of Five-AxisMachine ToolsR.-S. Lee and C.-H. SheDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of ChinaThis paper presents a postprocessor capable of convertingcutter location (CL) dam to machine control data for threetypical five-axis machine tools to establish an interface betweencomputer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems and numericallycontrolled (NC) machines, The analytical equations for NCdata are obtained using the homogeneous coordinate transformationmatrix and inverse kinematics. In addition, thedeveloped postprocessor method is implemenwd through atrial-cut on a five-axis machine and verified on the coordinatemeasurement machine. Experimental results confirmed theeffectiveness of the proposed postprocessor method which canbe used to integrate the various five-axis machine toolsemployed in manufacturing systems.Keywords: Coordinate transformation matrix; Cutter locationdata; Five-axis machines; NC programming; Postprocessor1.Introduction Freeform surfaces (or sculptured surfaces) have found extensiveindustrial applications, such as in automobile bodies, ship hullsand aerospace parts. The mould or stamping die used to createsuch a part is usually machined using numerically controlled(NC) machine tools. The conventional way of machining freeformsurfaces is by using a three-axis machine tool with aball end-mill. Three-axis machine tools cannot change the toolorientation, so a five-axis machine tool is introduced to set thecutting tool in an appropriate orientation for efficient machining.With the rapidly advancing computer technology, commercialCAD/CAM systems can design freeform surfaces andgenerate either the three-axis or five-axis tool path. The cutterlocation (CL) data, composed of cutter tip position and thetool orientation, can then be directly obtained from a CADmodel of a product design created in the CAD/CAM systems.However, difficulty frequently arises in co