• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.161-167
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• 1993

This paper deals with a new method for the machining of a die cavity defined by sculptured surfaces. In machining die cavities or pockets, process planners have been faced with some troulbes. One of the troubles ius to rebove a great deal of material within a given boundary while avoiding cutter interference. Cutter interference is a ciritical problem in NC machining of a die cavity. Even though this cavity machining has been implemented in many CAM systems, most of them can handle limited shapes of cavities or pockets. In this paper, a procedure has been developed to machine die cavity or pocket of a sculptured surface. The offset surfaces of the part surfaces and boundary surfaces are determined to calculate the intersection curves. These intersection curves form a FACE on the part surface, and the interference free tool pathe is generated by eliminating the points outside the FACE when computing the cutter contact (CC) data. Additionally, the cutter location (CL) data obtained from the CC data convert to an NC data. The NC data generated through this algorithm are verified on the CINCINNATI milling machine. A propotype die cavity machining system has been implemented in FORTRAN language and FIGARO graphics library on IRIS workstation.