Suppressing vibrations in milling-trimming process of the plate-like workpiece by optimizing the location of vibration absorber

Milling-based trimming process is a commonly used machining means for shaping the edges of the plate-like workpieces, some of which are usually designed as zigzag shapes because of the functional requirements such as the invisibility of aircrafts. Dynamic vibrations occurring in this kind of process seriously reduces the specified accuracy of the edges, while their controlling means are seldom reported in the existing works. This article presents a method by using an additional dynamic vibration absorber (DVA) to control the vibrations in the milling-based edge trimming process of the plate-like workpieces. Instead of treating the DVA as a lumped mass widely adopted by previous researchers, the layout, shape and size of the DVA are actually taken into account in this article. A simulation-and-analysis-combined approach for predicting the modal parameters of the workpiece under different layouts of the DVA is proposed. Effect of the DVA on the multi-dominant modes and response of the workpiece is theoretically studied. To realize mitigating the dynamic displacements of the workpiece during the whole milling process to the largest degree, an optimization algorithm aiming at minimizing the displacement amplitude of the in-process cutting point and also finding the best location of the absorber on the workpiece is mathematically derived. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by a series of milling experiments.