Improved tool path generation, error measures and analysis for sculptured surface machining

Sculptured surface machining is important in applications such as die manufacture and turbine blade production. An offline planning of the tool path for complex surface production is desired to reduce the tedium and time consumption of physical path planning. Such planning is also essential for true concurrent engineering. In the present work, simple and efficient methodology and software are developed for NC tool path generation to machine sculptured surfaces using an improved parametric plane based technique. Two error parameters are developed for describing the deviation between the desired surface and the actual path, and can be used for offline NC path planning. Analysis is performed on arbitrarily selected shapes, using the software developed, to study the effect of selected tolerances and the diameter of the cutter on the errors.