 | 2006 |
Abstract:
Most technical components applied in industrial practice are subjected to metal cutting operations during their production process. However, this leads to undesirable thermal and mechanical loads affecting the machined workpiece, which can result in an impairment of its serviceability. Due to their small wall thickness lightweight hollow profiles are highly susceptible to the inevitable machining loads and thermal stresses during drilling processes. For the virtual optimization of the machining process and in order to ensure a suitable process strategy, a finite element simulation of cutting operations for thin-walled light metal profiles is conducted. Due to the flexibility within creating drill holes of different diameters without tool changes circular milling represents a promising alternative to the application of conventional drilling tools for variable process strategies to handle batch sizes down to one piece efficiently. Hence, this article gives an insight into the investigations regarding the modeling concepts of the mechanical and thermal loads induced into the thin-walled lightweight frame structure during the circular milling process. Furthermore, process reliability aspects as well as the correlation of the calculated and the measured results will be discussed on the basis of experimental investigations. Finally, this article compares Finite Element Analysis aspects of circular milling processes with conventional drilling processes.