Cutting Performance Evaluation of End Mills for Titanium Aircraft Components

Titanium aircraft component has been considering difficult-to-cut not only for the poor machinability of material itself but also for the complexity of its structure which generally consists of thin-ribs, thin-webs, corners, pockets, etc. Structural features are therefore as important as material properties for the selection of cutting tools when machining titanium aircraft components. In this paper, a new method of cutting performance evaluation of end mills was proposed for the machining process of titanium aircraft components. A test benchmark with typical difficult-to-cut features extracted from aircraft components was first designed as well as its machining process. In order to comprehensively evaluate the cutting performance, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) models which considered the tool wear, material removal rate, surface roughness and dimension error were developed for rough and finish end milling respectively. Finally, experiments of milling the benchmark were carried out, and then the FCE models were applied to evaluate the cutting performance of end mills. The results show that the method is suitable and effective to evaluate cutting performance of end mills for titanium aircraft components.