Five-axis CNC grinding of end-mills with generic revolving profiles

Manufacturing end-mill cutting tools of non-traditional revolving profiles have been recently increasing with the increasing demands on smooth and curvy products. Among many tool design features, rake faces are considered the most crucial as they control the cutting forces, guide the tool flutes for smooth chips evacuations, and affect tools vibrations. Thus, the need arose to build a CNC grinding approach to grind the rake faces of end-mills having a generic cutting edge model. A revolving profile of a free-form curve, Non-periodic Uniform Rational Basis Spline (NURBS), is adopted in the present work, and a generic cutting edge model is established. The model can represent the cutting edges of both end-mills with traditional and end-mills with non-traditional revolving profiles. The importance of the model is very obvious in the tools manufacturing, specifically in the rake face grinding. A computer simulation for grinding rake faces of end-mills with freeform revolving profiles using a five-axis CNC grinding approach is conducted. The end-mills are obtained with accurate cutting edges and precise normal rake angles along those edges. © 2015 Jordan Journal of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. All rights reserved.