Cutter-workpiece engagement calculations by adaptively sampled distance field for turn-milling

Based on Adaptively sampled Distance Field (ADF), a solution to calculate the cutter-workpiece engagement geometries in typical turn-milling motion forms was presented. The distance field of original workpiece was adaptively sampled with an octree bounding volume hierarchy, and the distance values in swept volume's distance field were calculated. A Boolean operation between the distance fields of original workpiece and the swept volume was performed. To get the ADF of the in-process workpiece, the distance field was reconstructed from the modified samples at non-vertex positions using trilinear reconstruction. Based on distance values between a set of sampling points on the cutter at given cutter locations and the in-process workpiece, the engagement could be found. The comparison with solid modeling-based solution showed that the research provided high effective and high accuracy approach for calculation of cutter-workpiece engagement in turn-milling.