Estimation of NC machining time using NC block distribution for sculptured surface machining

The estimation of NC machining time is of importance because it provides manufacturing engineers with information to accurately predict the productivity of an NC machine, as well as its production schedule. NC programs contain various machining information, such as tool positions, feed and speed rates, and other machine instructions. Nominal NC machining time can easily be obtained based on the NC program data. Actual machining time, however, cannot simply be found due to the dynamic characteristics of a NC machine controller, such as acceleration and deceleration effect. Hence, this study presents an NC machine time estimation model for machining sculptured surfaces, considering such dynamic characteristics of the machine. The proposed estimation model uses several factors, such as the distribution of NC blocks, angle between the blocks, federates, acceleration and deceleration constants, classifying tool feed rate patterns into four types based on the acceleration and deceleration profile, NC block length, and minimum feed rate. However, there exists an error for the actual machining time due to the lack of the measurement equipment or tools to gauge an exact minimum feed rate. Thus, this paper proposes a machining time estimation model using NC block distributions, lowering down the error caused by the inaccurate minimum feed rate. The proposed machining time estimator performs at around 10% of mean error. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.