doi:10.3850/978-981-08-6555-9_151

ABSTRACT

Micro milling is becoming increasingly important in manufacturing a great variety of micro components in materials including steels, aluminium alloys and copper alloys. Recently, tools with cutting diameters down to 0.05 mm have become commercially available. However, the tools with small diameters are prone to premature failure. Based on recent research, it was found that tool failure is very difficult to predict as each individual tool performs differently. This research investigates one of the possible reasons for the wide range of critical cutting distances; namely, dimensional tolerances of micro end-mills. Due to the very small dimensions, high rotational speeds involved and great complexity of the cutting process, it was found very difficult to separate the effect of the dimensional tolerances from all the other possible causes of tool-life variations. Therefore, numerical stress analysis was used to predict the effect of tool tolerances on micro milling performance. The analysis shows inner tool stress is related to cutting conditions.

Keywords: Analytical cutting force model, Finite element analysis, Micro-milling, Stress.

© 2011 4M 2010 Organisers