The end milling cutter is used for machining with plane, groove, and complex surfaces. It is different from turning, the path design and choice of milling are also very important in the machining of groove and complex surface of these CNC machined parts. Such as the general method of milling groove, at the same time, the processing of the circular arc contact Angle up to 180, heat dissipation conditions are poor will lead to the temperature rising sharply in the process. And if you change the cutting path, the milling cutter revolution on the one side and rotation on the other side, so as to reduce the contact Angle, and each turn cut, can make the cutting force and cutting temperature drop, tool life extension. Thus, cutting can be sustained for a longer period of time, such (Figure 1) is called the Trochoid Milling Process.
Its advantage is to reduce the difficulty of cutting and guarantee the machining quality. Reasonable selection cutting parameters can improve efficiency and reduce cost. Especially in high heat resistant alloy, high hard material and other difficult to process materials can play a significant role in the processing and has great development potential, perhaps this is the reason why the industry pays more and more attention to choosing of Trochoid Milling machining method.
Technical Advantages of Trochoid Milling
The Trochoid is also called the Trochoid and the Extended Epicycloid, which is the track of the point outside or inside the moving circle when the moving circle extends a certain line for non-sliding rolling, it can also be called a long (short) spin line. More than Trochoid processing is the diameter of the groove width than the small end milling cutter, with its side will be half of the circular arc groove processing into a small circular arc side processing, can be processed all kinds of groove and profile cavity. In this way, in theory, an end milling cutter can be used to process slots and profiles of any size larger than it, and it can also be used to process a series of products conveniently.
With the IT tech development and applications, available control and more options of CNC Milling in many aspects are much more popular. What’s more, CNC milling is more and more important in the aerospace field, vehicle equipment, module manufacturing, etc. Especially aerospace has many difficulties in the titanium alloy and nickel-based heat resistant alloy parts.
The high hardness of thermal strength makes the cutting tool hard to bear and even deform.
High shear strength makes the blade easy to be damaged.
Low heat conductivity makes it difficult for high heat to derive from the cutting area, where the temperature often exceeds 1000 C, which aggravates the tool wear;
During the processing, the material is often fused to the edge of the blade, forming a chip tumor. Poor surface quality;
The working hardening phenomenon of nickel-based heat resistant alloy with the austere matrix is serious.
The carbide in the micro-structure of nickel-based heat resistant alloy will cause abrasive wear to the tool. Titanium alloy has great chemical activity, the chemical reaction also aggravates the damage, and so on.
These difficulties can be made use of the redundant cyclonic cnc milling technology to make the processing continue and proceed smoothly. As the material, coating, geometry, and structure of cutting tools are constantly optimized, intelligent control systems, programming technology, and the rapid progress of high-speed and high-efficiency multi-functional machine tools, high-speed (HSC) and high-efficiency (HPC) cutting processing has also reached a new height.
High-speed machining mainly considers the improvement of speed. Efficient machining should not only consider the improvement of cutting speed but also consider the reduction of auxiliary time, reasonable configuration of cutting parameters, cutting path, composite machining to reduce procedures, improve the metal removal rate per unit time, while extending tool life, reducing costs, considering environmental protection.
Technology Outlook
Trochoidal milling application in application data display (as the chart shown below), when machining titanium alloy Ti6242, unit volume cutting tool costs down nearly 50%, processing of nickel-based heat resistant alloy as resistant to the groove of the 718 parts, working hours can fell by 63%, the cutting tool can fell by 72%, the number of overall demand tooling costs fell by 61%.
But the producing time of the X17CrNi16-2 will be less than 70%.
The advanced trochoidal milling process is widely used in more and more aspects and is well known in precision machining and used in those filed.
