Improving Stability Prediction in Peripheral Milling of Al7075T6

Abstract

Chatter is an old enemy to machinists but, even today, is far from being defeated. Current requirements around aerospace components call for stronger and thinner workpieces which are more prone to vibrations. This study presents the stability analysis for a single degree of freedom down-milling operation in a thin-walled workpiece. The stability charts were computed by means of the enhanced multistage homotopy perturbation (EMHP) method, which includes the helix angle but also, most importantly, the runout and cutting speed effects. Our experimental validation shows the importance of this kind of analysis through a comparison with a common analysis without them, especially when machining aluminum alloys. The proposed analysis demands more computation time, since it includes the calculation of cutting forces for each combination of axial depth of cut and spindle speed. This EMHP algorithm is compared with the semi-discretization, Chebyshev collocation, and full-discretization methods in terms of convergence and computation efficiency, and ultimately proves to be the most efficient method among the ones studied.

Keywords

• numerical methods
• milling
• computation
• stability