Milling stability prediction of AL2A12 thin-walled workpiece based on radial basis functions

During a thin-walled workpiece's milling, its surface quality is greatly affected by chatter. Chatter free condition can be obtained if the milling stability is predicted before practical machining. Here, a milling stability prediction method was proposed based on the radial basis function approaching theory. The cutting force coefficients and modal parameters of the AL2A12 thin-walled workpiece were acquired with cutting tests and hammer tests, respectively. The state transfer matrix of the milling system was deduced with the proposed method, and the stability lobe diagram was determined with Floquet theorem. In order to verify the computational efficiency of the proposed method, the same system parameters were used in different methods. Compared with the zeroth-order semi-discretization method and the full-discretization method, it was indicated that the proposed method has the highest computational efficiency under the premise that the stability lobe diagrams obtained with different methods are coincident. Then, the AL2A12 thin-walled workpiece was machined with the given spindle speeds and axial cut depths being corresponding to the four points selected from the predicted stability lobe diagram. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified through comparing the machining results with the prediction ones. The practical machining showed that better machined surface can be obtained with higher spindle speed when the axial cut depths are close to each other, the milling tool sticky phenomenon can also be avoided with higher spindle speed.