Design for Manufacturing: Geometric Manufacturability Evaluation for Five-Axis Milling

Abstract

The geometric manufacturability of a part design is an important decision factor for various manufacturing applications and is especially critical for the machining process. In machining, the geometric manufacturability is primarily determined by geometric accessibility, which has a direct impact on decisions such as setup planning, tool selection, tool orientation selection/adjustment, and the tool path strategies. These planning decisions can have a significant impact on cycle time and cost. Thus, it can be justified that geometric manufacturability is one of the essential product design aspects that must be evaluated for machining processes. Being able to evaluate the geometric manufacturability will not only provide a part design metric but also offer a new approach for manufacturing process planning and optimization. This research proposes a new method for determining the geometric manufacturability of a part designed for five-axis milling. In this work, the part design is input as polygon mesh boundary represented models, the 3D tool geometry is sampled to line segments, the 3D geometric accessibility of the part design is calculated, and a new metric for five-axis milling manufacturability evaluation is developed. Case studies on complex mechanical component design examples are conducted to validate the method.