Five-axis flank milling is widely used due to its higher cutting efficiency and better surface finish quality compared with point milling. In recent years, the use of flank milling has been further extended from single-pass milling to multi-pass milling. However, the existing multi-pass flank milling methods focus only on a simple parametric surface and suffer from extraneous machining problems due to the varied cutting width. Moreover, as they ignore the tool’s effective cutting length, they are in general incapable of handling other related constraints such as the hard constraints of no-overcut and interference-free. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm of planning multi-pass flank milling for a complex freeform surface mesh. In our method, the design surface mesh is naturally partitioned based on a tangent vector field and each partitioned patch is approximated by a set of piecewise quasi-developable quad strips, on which semi-finishing flank milling tool paths of a given constant cutting width are generated tending to all the required constraints such as no-overcut. The powerful algebraic technique of level-set method is utilized to generate a scalar field on each patch whose iso-lines will serve as the equi-distant cutter contact rulings of the initial quad strips. An elaborated energy-based unified framework is then presented that will optimize the signed quad strips to increase their developability while satisfying all the machining constraints, thus further reducing the flanking machining error with all the hard constraints (e.g., no-overcut) upheld. Ample physical cutting experiments are performed, whose results convincingly confirm the advantages of the proposed method.

五轴侧面铣削由于与点铣削相比具有更高的切削效率和更好的表面光洁度质量而被广泛使用。近年来，侧面铣削的使用已从单道次铣削进一步扩展到多道次铣削。然而，现有的多道次侧面铣削方法仅关注简单的参数化曲面，并且由于切削宽度的变化而存在额外的加工问题。此外，由于他们忽略了刀具的有效切削长度，因此他们通常无法处理其他相关约束，例如无过切和无干涉的硬约束。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于复杂自由曲面网格的规划多道次侧面铣削的新算法。在我们的方法中，设计表面网格是基于切线矢量场自然划分的，每个划分的补丁都由一组分段准可展四边形近似，在四边形上生成给定恒定切削宽度的半精加工侧铣刀路径，趋向于所有所需的约束，如无过度切割。水平集方法的强大代数技术用于在每个补丁上生成标量场，其等值线将用作初始四边形的等距刀具接触规则。然后提出了一个详细的基于能量的统一框架，该框架将优化带符号的四边形条带，以提高其可开发性，同时满足所有加工约束，从而在所有硬约束（例如，无过切）得到支持的情况下进一步减少侧翼加工误差。