Active regenerative chatter suppression during boring manufacturing process

Machining performance such as that of the boring process is often limited by chatter vibration at the tool-workpiece interface. Among various sources of chatter, regenerative chatter in cutting systems is found to be the most detrimental. It limits cutting depth (as a result, productivity), adversely affects surface finish and causes premature tool failure. Though the machining system is a distributed system, all current active controllers have been designed based upon a simplified lumped single degree of freedom cutting process model. This is because it was found that in the majority of cutting processes, there exists only one dominating mode. However, such simplification does have some potential problems. First, since the system itself is a distributed system, theoretically it consists of infinite number of vibration modes. When the controller is designed to control the dominating mode(s) only, the energy designed to suppress the particular mode(s) may excite the rest of the structural modes, which unavoidably causes the so-called spillover problem. Second, the success of the control design of such simplified single degree of freedom system relies on the availability of accurate model parameters (such as the effective mass, stiffness and damping), which is unfortunately very hard to acquire. This is because the global properties are varying with the metal removal process and the movable components of machine tool. In this paper, an active controller designed from wave point of view is used to absorb chatter vibration energy in a broad frequency band to improve machining performance of a non-rotating boring bar. In contrast to most of the current active chatter control design, the wave controller is designed based on the real distributed cutting system model. The main advantage of such a control scheme to chatter suppression is its robustness to model uncertainties. The control scheme also eliminates the control spillover problem. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.