A Generalized Approach to Designing Profile Milling Cutters Equipped with Replaceable Throw-Away Ceramic Cutting Inserts

Modular principle is widely used to design milling cutters equipped with replaceable cutting inserts mounted in cutter's body. This style of the cutter design is appropriate mainly for medium-sized and large mills having either simple or complex shape of initial tool surface generatrix and is applicable for many tasks in different metalworking fields. Cutting ceramics is an advanced class of materials used to machine hard-to-cut construction materials like nickel alloys with high cutting speed. Cutters with ceramic inserts require special approaches to design due to lack of toughness and resistance to both mechanical and thermal shock. In most general case, cutting inserts are distributed along irregular helical line lying on the complex-shaped initial tool surface. Besides, there are a number of possible layout schemes of inserts position and orientation inside the cutter's body. All these issues make designing modular milling cutters an important and complicated problem. In the present paper, a generalized approach to define proper position and orientation of cutting ceramic inserts in cutter's body is considered. The graph theory, set theory and analytic geometry are exploited to build a comprehensive model of milling cutters equipped with replaceable throw-away ceramic cutting inserts.