Toolpath Generation for Four-Axis Rough Milling of Sculptured Surface Turbine Blade

Presented in this paper is a method for four-axis rough milling of sculptured Surface turbine blade. The proposed method consists of two steps, cutter-contact (CC) points generation and tool orientation planning. In the first stage, CC points for trimmed blade surface are generated in the parametric domain and then they are converted into the physical domain to get flow line toolpaths. In the second stage, optimized representative tool orientations are generated first, and then interpolation algorithm is employed to determine all tool orientations. With this method, smooth tool orientations call be obtained. Finally, computational examples were implemented to generate symmetrical spiral four-axis rough milling toolpath for the turbine blade disk. Simulation results show that the proposed method is efficient and it call improve the utilization of four-axis machine tools in the milling of turbine blade.