Abstract

For a solid carbide tapered end-mill, every flute includes a flute surface and a rake face along a helical side cutting edge, and the end-mill core is at the center and is tangent to all the flutes. The flutes significantly affect the tools cutting performance and life, and the core radius mainly affects the tools rigidity. Mainly, two methods are adopted in industry to grind the flutes; these are: the direct method and the inverse method. In the direct method, a flute is ground using a standard grinding-wheel moving in multi-axis machining to generate the rake face and the flute surface. However, the flute is the natural outcome of the grinding process without any control. On the other side, the inverse method employs the concept of inverse engineering to build a grinding-wheel that accurately grinds the end-mill flutes. This yields a free-form grinding-wheel profile that is used on a 2-axis grinding machine; however, the flute shapes are only exact on one section of the end-mill; when the grinding-wheel moves along the side cutting edge to smaller sections; the deviation of the generated flute from the designed one will be increased. Thus, neither can this method grind the rake face with the prescribed normal rake angle, nor generate the side cutting edge in good agreement with its design. Moreover, the grinding-wheel profile is very difficult and expensive to make.

To address these problems, a practical and optimal approach for five-axis grinding of prescribed end-mill flutes is proposed by; first, establishing a 5-axis flute grinding theory describing the wheels locations and orientations during grinding the rake faces with constant normal rake angles; Second, introducing a simple grinding-wheel consisting of lines and circular arcs; and finally, applying an optimization algorithm to optimize the grinding-wheel shape and path. Overall, this approach significantly advances the CNC programming technique for the 5-axis flute grinding, and can substantially increase the quality of the solid carbide end-mills and lays a good foundation for the CAD/CAE/CAM of end-mills. The advantages of this approach over the other approaches are verified using computer simulation.