Development of a rapid heat ablation (RHA) process using a hot tool

Rapid prototyping and manufacturing (RPM) technologies have played a crucial role in reducing the lead-time and development costs of new products since its birth in the late 1980s. As compared with laminating processes for RPM, the machining process has been more commonly used because it offers such practical advantages as precision and versatility. However, the traditional machining process requires a large amount of time for product cutting and the remaining material causes problem as inconvenience due to cleaning process. The objective of this paper is to propose a new rapid manufacturing process using a hot tool with tangential grooves, rapid heat ablation process (RHA), to overcome the limitations of traditional machining processes. In order to investigate the material removal zone according to process parameters, several experiments were carried out. From the results of experiments, the relationships between the radius of the material removal zone and the process parameters were obtained. Furthermore, the depth of cut was compared with the kerfwidth in order to verify the isotropy of the material removal zone. As a result, a method of toolpath generation for ball-end mill commercially used can be adopted into the RHA process because the geometry of material removal zone is equal to that of the ball-end mill. The practical applicability of the RHA process is then demonstrated by the results of these fabrications for a hemispherical shape and a standard test part for machining in terms of geometrical conformity, volume of remaining material, ablating time and dimensional accuracy.