A Generating Method of One-stroke Random Toolpath and Its Influence on Surface Quality of Fluid Jet Polishing

A regular toolpath, the spiral or raster, inevitably leaves repetitive signature in the surface and such signatures can cause unwanted diffraction effects in critical applications. The aim of this paper is to generate one type of random toolpath to obtain high quality surfaces. Based on the conditions that need to be met for random toolpaths in automatic polishing process, such as no cross, continuous, cover the surface, this paper proposes a method, named as “Guide path”, to generate a new random toolpath. Then the effect of path spacing and turning point on the removal uniform was simulated with “Gauss” and “W” shape removal functions respectively. How the new random toolpath may affect the removal of material under different path spacing in fluid jet polishing (FJP) was investigated and compared with the raster toolpath. The results show that, when the path spacing is more than 0.4mm, the surface polished by using the raster toolpath has obvious trajectory information, while it was no by using the random toolpath. In addition, the power spectral density (PSD) of the surface polished by the random toolpath is obviously smaller than the surface polished by the raster toolpath. However, the PV value of the polished surface using random toolpaths is higher than the raster toolpath, due to the fluctuations of the path spacing and with a greater number of turning points in the random toolpath.