Multi-dexel based material removal simulation and cutting force prediction with the use of general-purpose graphics processing units

When the mechanistic cutting force model is applied for cutting force prediction during multi-axis milling, the accurate determination of the contact area between the cutter and the workpiece and the fast processing of the gained geometry data play an important role. During the evolution of the material removal simulation techniques the discrete z-map method has become the most widespread in this field, although it does not cover the whole cutter surface and its use requires the rearranging of the geometry data before the cutting force estimation. In this paper the reconstruction of the cutting force equations of the mechanistic model is proposed for the purpose of the direct consuming of the geometry data. To this end the multi-dexel based material removal simulation method is applied which provides general solution for the contact area determination on the whole cutter surface and gives more accurate result as opposed to the z-map method. The form of the introduced algorithms lets them being executed in a highly parallelized manner by general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), thereby increasing dramatically the performance of the simulation and the cutting force estimation as compared to the existing solutions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.