The prediction of surface error characteristics in the peripheral milling of thin-walled structures

Lightweight design is gaining in importance throughout the engineering sector, and with it, workpieces are becoming increasingly complex. Particularly, thin-walled parts require highly accurate and efficient machining strategies. Such low-rigidity structures usually undergo significant deformations during peripheral milling operations, thus suffering surface errors and a violation of tolerance specifications. This article introduces a general approach to mitigating surface errors during the peripheral milling of thin-walled aluminum workpieces. It incorporates an analytical approach to predicting surface-error characteristics based on geometrical quantities and process parameters, which is presented in detail. Milling experiments, including geometrical measurements of the samples, have been performed to verify the approach. The approach allows for a pre-selection of parameter sets that result in surface errors that can be compensated with minimal effort. Additionally, the introduced model offers a simple criterion to assess potential error mitigation by applying the respective tool-path adjustments. In doing so, the amount of costly numerical simulations or experiments is significantly reduced.