Milling force vibration analysis in high-speed-milling titanium alloy using variable pitch angle mill

Chatter may cause fast wear of tools and poor surface quality of the workpieces at high cutting speed and it will happen on different process parameters; how do we select the suitable cutting speed to suppress the chatter? In this paper, a signal analysis method for milling force and acceleration is adopted to identify chatter, which can obtain the results not only in frequency of chatter but also in the contribution for milling force at different frequencies. Through the milling experiment, the machining vibration behaviors of milling Ti-6Al-4V with variable pitch end mill were investigated. Milling force and acceleration signals obtained from experiment were analyzed and compared at stable and unstable milling processes. The experimental results show that when the chatter occurs, milling forces were found to increase dramatically by 61.9-66.8% compared with that of at stable cutting; machining surface quality became poor and machined surface roughness increases by 34.2-40.5% compared with that of at stable cutting.