Abstract: In machining 3-axis sculptured surface, the quality of machined surface has a close connection with the quality of tool path. When the tool path is generated by using current CAD/CAM integrated software and a tolerance of 0.01mm is set as usual, the machined surface would probably have such disadvantages as surface dents, poor roughness. To solve this problem, a tool path optimization method based on mesh uniformization is proposed in this paper. Based on the original tool path generated by Cimatron, We construct the dominant contour and modify the irregular points to reduce the variety of the inclination degree between the succeeding paths, then identify the smooth continuous line segments along the same path and fit the smooth continuous line segments by using piecewise 3-order spline curve to improve the smoothness of curve along the same path. Simulation and actual machining experiment verify that the proposed method can eliminate the dents on the surface and improve the final machined surface quality effectively.

Key words: 3-axis sculptured surface machining, tool path optimization, transverse fairing, longitudinal smoothing