Mitigation of chatter instabilities in milling by active structural control

This paper documents the experimental validation of an active control approach for mitigating chatter in milling. To the authors knowledge, this is the first successful hardware demonstration of this approach. This approach is very different from many existing approaches that avoid instabilities by varying process parameters to seek regions of stability or by altering the regenerative process. In this approach, the stability lobes of the machine and tool are actively raised. This allows for machining at spindle speeds that are more representative of those used in existing machine tools. An active control system was implemented using actuators and sensors surrounding a spindle and tool. Due to the complexity of controlling from a stationary co-ordinate system and sensing from a rotating system, a telemetry system was used to transfer structural vibration data from the tool to a control processor. Closed-loop experiments produced up to an order of magnitude improvement in metal removal rate. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.