An experimental investigation of rotary ultrasonic face milling

Reliable and cost-effective machining of advanced ceramics is crucially important for them to be widely used in a number of critical engineering applications. The potential of Rotary Ultrasonic Machining (RUM) process has been recognized as one of the reliable and cost-effective machining methods for advanced ceramics and commercial machinery is available for the process. One limitation of the commercial RUM machines is that only circular holes can be efficiently machined. An approach to extend the RUM process to fare milling of ceramics was proposed and the development of the experimental apparatus as well as the preliminary experimental results were published earlier in this journal. As a follow-up, this paper will present the results of an experimental investigation of the newly-developed Rotary Ultrasonic Face Milling (RUFM) process. In this investigation, a five-variable two-level fractional factorial design is used to conduct the experiments. The purpose of these experiments is to reveal the main effects as well as the interaction effects of the process parameters on the process outputs such as Material Removal Rate (MRR), cutting force, material removal mode and surface roughness. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.