Stability prediction for toroidal cutters with non-uniform helix angles in the milling process

Abstract Milling technology is widely used in the modern industry. However, traditional tools cannot meet the requirements of suppressing chatter as well as improving the machining efficiency in some cases. Therefore, the idea of tools with non-uniform helix angles is proposed to remove materials in the milling process. Thus, to study the chatter suppressing of toroidal cutters with non-uniform helix angles, this paper presents a method to predict stability lobes. First, the governing equation of the milling dynamics model considering the tools’ structure is established. Based on this model, the enhanced multistage homotopy perturbation method (EMHPM) is used to compute the stability lobes. For verifying validity, some experiments are conducted. The results show that the proposed method is accurate to predict the stability and the tools with non-uniform helix angle indeed increase the stability in milling process.