Regenerative machine tool chatter is investigated for milling operations with helical tools. The stability of a two-degreesof-freedom milling model is analyzed
IntroductionThe occurrence of harmful vibrations (chatter) during metal cutting processes is an important problem in manufacturing technology. Machine tool chatter has many unfavorable effects: it reduces the productivity and the surface quality, causes noise, enhances tool wearing, and even leads to tool damage in some cases. Therefore, avoiding or suppressing chatter is highly important for the machine tool industry. In the past few decades, a significant amount of research was conducted to find the governing physical phenomena behind chatter in order to understand its nature and describe methods to avoid or suppress it.One of the most widely accepted explanations of machine tool chatter is the theory of surface regeneration introduced by Tobias [1] and Tlusty [2]: the vibrating tool leaves a wavy surface behind, which results in a varying cutting-force in the consecutive cut. Accordingly, delay effects appear in the models of metal cutting operations since the cutting-force exciting the tool motion is determined by the chip thickness, which depends both on the actual tool position and the delayed position at the previous cut. Hence, machine tool vibrations can be described using delay-differential equations, and the regenerative machine tool chatter can be considered as the manifestation of self-excited oscillations in a time-delay system.Following the works of Tobias and Tlusty, a large effort has been put lately into the more accurate modeling of machine tool chatter. In this paper we follow the model of [3], where the stability of turning processes is investigated taking the distribution of the cutting force along the tool's rake face into account. The concept was experimentally verified in [4]. Extension to interrupted turning operation was presented in [5]. Here, we will extend the distributed cutting-force model to milling processes and perform the stability analysis.The outline of the paper is the following. Section 2 presents the mechanical model of the system, the description of the cutting-force expression, and the final form of the governing equation. In Section 3, the semi-discretization technique [6] is applied to analyze the stability of the system numerically. Some numerical issues regarding computational efficiency are also highlighted. Section 4 considers the special cases of the