Four-axis trochoidal toolpath planning for rough milling of aero-engine blisks

The Blade Integrated Disk (Blisk) is one of the key components in the aero-engine, it is generally manufactured by the multi-axis milling and almost 90% raw materials are removed. To avoid the full immersion of a cutter in the rough machining of a blisk channel, the trochoidal milling is a promising strategy since it can keep a small immersion angle in the rough milling process while maintaining the high machining efficiency. However, while toolpaths are being planned for the trochoidal milling process, the conventional methods are mainly for the planar machining area with fixed tool orientations, which cannot be used for complex channels where the multi-axis machining should be employed. To this end, this paper presents a four-axis trochoidal toolpath planning method with a ball-end cutter, and thus the blisk channel can be machined efficiently. For this to happen, the trochoidal paths are planned in the parametric domain and then mapped into the physical domain, with tool orientations controlled by the quaternion interpolation method to have smooth tool movement along the toolpaths. Both geometric simulation and physical milling experiments of the proposed method have convincingly demonstrated the validation of the proposed method.