This article presents a novel numerical model to generate abrasion surface topography. The main difficulty encountered regarding abrasion simulation is the numerical complexity caused by the number of interactions. In addition, the resulting surface topography is not only the result of cutting but also repelling and deforming matter. Thus the geometry is not strictly defined by the intersection between the grains and the mechanical part. Considering both numerical and physical constraints, an implicit geometrical model has been developed. The features of an implicitly defined surface make it a suitable candidate to address abrasion removal phenomenon. Within this formulation, the surface is embedded in a volumetric data set and is retrieved as the set of points having the same field value. Thus, the correlation between a scalar field and the specimen surface has been leveraged to model the abrasive grain actions. The removal action occurs throughout the penalization of the volumetric data field. The extension of each particle interaction range to model the plastic flow is done with negligible additional cost.

The manufacturing of high added-value products in multi-axis machining requires advanced simulation in order to validate the process. Whereas CAM software editors provide simulation software that allows the detection of global interferences or local gouging, research works have shown that it is possible to consider multi-scale simulations of the surface, with a realistic description of both the tools and the machining path. However, computing capacity remains a problem for interactive and realistic simulations in 5-axis continuous machining. In this context, using general-purpose computing on graphics processing units as well as Nvidia OptiX Ray Tracing Engine makes it possible to develop a robust simulation application. Thus, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the use of Nvidia OptiX Ray Tracing Engine compared to a fully integrated CUDA software, in terms of computing time and development effort. Experimental investigations are carried out on different hardware such as Xeon CPU, Quadro4000, Tesla K40 and Titan Z GPUs. Results show that the development of such an application with the OptiX development kit is very simple and that the performances in roughing simulations are very promising. Developed software as well as dataset can be downloaded from http://webserv.lurpa.ens-cachan.fr/simsurf.