Simultaneous double-sided milling of flexible plates with high accuracy and high efficiency—Suppression of forced chatter vibration with synchronized single-tooth cutters

This paper presents a new method to finish flexible plates with high accuracy and high productivity. Precision steel plates are finished conventionally by face milling with electro-magnetic chucks. It is difficult to improve flatness of the flexible plates, because they deform to fit the chuck surfaces while clamped. The authors have applied simultaneous double-sided milling to solve this problem, but it causes forced chatter vibration which is not allowed in precision finishing. Thus, the new method is proposed and verified to suppress the forced chatter vibration, in which the both surfaces are finished simultaneously with single tooth milling cutters with synchronization so that the thrust forces are cancelled out on the both sides.