Theoretical and experimental studies of a single tooth milling process

Abstract: The industrial development of metal cutting processes in gear manufacturing aims at continuously increasing productivity, including increased tool reliability. Basically, the parameters that have an influence on the cutting processes should be known and possible to control.Gear manufacturing is highly important for the automotive industry. The prevalent manufacturing method is gear hobbing with hobs consisting of solid Powder Metallurgical High Speed Steel (PM HSS) with Physical Vapor Deposited (PVD) coatings.The hob teeth have to be reconditioned before wear reaches such levels that the gear quality becomes impaired. Such wear often results in a total breakdown of the tool. One crucial reason for this is that hobbing processes for the present often lack reliability; which makes it difficult for the gear manufacturers to predict the tool wear on the hob teeth and decide when the tool should be replaced in order to avoid severe damages. A consequence of catastrophic tool wear is that it leads to an instantaneously changed geometry of the cutting edge, which in turn implies that the machined gears do not comply with the stipulated properties on the machined gear products.A single tooth milling test (STMT) with tools of PM-HSS in a conventional milling machine has been developed in this research project, aiming at characterizing the effect of tool preparation on the type of wear mechanism. The experience and conclusions from these tests may probably be transferred to real PM-HSS hob tooling (HT). The advantages of such a test, compared to a real gear hob test, are primarily the cost reductions and time saving aspects with respect to both the design and the manufacturing of the cutting teethThe research presented in this thesis is based on experimental investigations and theoretical studies of significant parameters, i.e. the surface roughness and edge rounding, contributing to the robust and reliable design of a PM-HSS cutting tool. The research work has in addition to, the development of the milling test method, also comprised development of measuring methods and a simulation model based on the Finite Element Model (FEM).