High speed cutting (HSC) offers the opportunity to significantly reduce machining times as well as to minimize manual rework for complex free form surfaces in the die and mould making industry. To achieve the best results it is also necessary to apply HSC-suitable machining strategies to perform optimal high speed milling operations. This paper presents a method to use free form features to improve the automatic generation of high speed machining information for specific geometric areas to create HSC free form manufacturing features. By examining the geometrical and topological information of the work piece’s virtual model, the feature elements can be extracted and joined with the required information. This covers several important high speed cutting aspects in the CAM system, like optimal technology and strategy suggestion, machining safety requirements and process stability of different strategies. Using this approach the programming time to produce HSC appropriate tool paths is reduced significantly, while it is quality is secured.
HSC machining; CAM systems; feature technology
