Advanced CAD/CAM techniques for 5-axis machining of free-form surfaces

This paper presents some advanced techniques on CAD modelling and CAM programming for 5-axis machining of free-form surfaces. In the CAD stage, based on surface partitioning, the design surface can be created with separate regions such as convex, concave and saddle. Point-based techniques are used to create the original surface and the boundary curves of the regions. Some other CAD/CAM techniques for determining tool sizes and tool orientations are also proposed to generate gouge-free tool paths for each region. A simple B-spline surface was given as an example to demonstrate the proposed techniques implemented in Creo Parametric. The points on the design surface and on the boundaries were generated by a Matlab program developed by the author. © 2019.