The Development Of Disk-Type Tools Design System For Helical Surfaces Machining

The helical surfaces play a very important role in the engineering field, such as the chip pocket on drilling and end milling cutters, the tooth profile on worm gears, the flute groove on screw compressor rotors and so on. Presently, the common processing method of helical groove is formed milling, using a disk-type tool. However, the design of disk-type tool is complex. The usual solution is to compile the special computer program for calculating the tool profile of a single helical groove. But this method is so dedicated as to affect the development of new products. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study the calculative process and software development of the form-milling cutters, and to improve the cutter profile's accuracy.Based on the forming milling theories of helical surfaces, a mathematical model is established by improving the contact mathematical model, which is based on the discrete points on the profile of workpiece. The first derivative of every discrete points is obtained by cubic spline fitting. While, the solution and first derivative of the helical groove's parametric equation can be obtained by using the MATLAB Engine. Furthermore, this paper presents the way of dealing with the special profile of milling cutters. That offers great convenience for developing the computer aided design program.A computer software was developed with VC++ for calculating the profile of formed disk-type tools. This software realizes the function of cutter profile's calculation for helical groove profiles given by the parametric equation with the help of MATLAB Engine technology; while, it makes the design result of milling cutters visually by using the modeling of openGL (open Graphics Library)and the GUI (Graphics User Interface)programming function of MFC.Finally, the software integration test was done according to the data providing by the factory. Comparing the cutter profile obtained by the software with the existing cutter profile showed that this software is capable of calculating the profile of formed disk-type tools, and achieved the expectation effect.