Abstract
Five-axis machining has been commonly used to produce complex components in automobile, aerospace, mold, and energy industries. The operation power consumed by a 5-axis machine tool for manufacturing large parts can be fairly substantial. The total energy amount accumulating over time becomes excessive especially for those parts of an extended product lifecycle. Any attempts to reduce the energy consumption in this case, even though the absolute saving seems marginal, may contribute greatly to the environment in a long run. For this purpose, this paper presents a preliminary study on reducing the kinematic energy consumed by a 5-axis CNC machine in a flank milling operation. We first demonstrate the differences in the energy spent by three tool path planning methods: (1) proceeding with a tilt angle, (2) interpolating between two cutter locations, and (3) setting each cutter location a corresponding tilt angle. Optimization schemes are then applied to adjust the tool paths in the last two methods for minimizing the kinematic energy, subject to the kinematic constraints on each motion axis. A simulation program implementing inverse kinematics (IKT) is developed to help visualize how different tool path planning influences the energy consumption of a 5-axis CNC machine while preforming the same machining task. The simulation results have validated the feasibility of reducing energy consumption in 5-axis flank machining via automatic tool path planning.