NC machining of trimmed surfaces maintaining adjacent-surfaces integrity

In practical surface design, most of the surfaces are trimmed surfaces resulting from Boolean manipulations. Avoiding damage to adjacent surfaces in the generation of tool paths for their machining is a fundamental problem. This paper presents an efficient method for representing and generating tool paths for the NC machining of trimmed surfaces considering this constraint. After 3D offsetting of surface contours, the method derives suitable tool paths from 2D pocket filling and then maps them onto the surface space either as isoparametric or iso-scallop patterns. As the method can deal efficiently with degenerate surfaces, it can be considered as a tool for CAM software integration.