Face-Milling Cutting Simulation of Bevel Gears Using Ring-Dexel Method

Face milling is primarily used for producing spiral bevel and hypoid gears. Over the past few decades, this cutting method has been implemented on five-axis CNC machine tools with a cutting path that has five nonlinear coordinates. As a result, NC codes must be checked before actual cutting to avoid collisions, and the produced tooth surfaces must be inspected. Previously, the Voxel method and marching cube algorithm were adopted to simulate the cutting process, but they were time-consuming due to Boolean operations. To overcome this problem, a new Dexel-ray method has been introduced in recent literature. This research proposes a ring-Dexel method to simulate bevel gear face milling cutting. Instead of using Dexel rays, the gear blank is constructed by three-dimensional circles. The interfering part between the tool and the gear blank is determined based on their cutting positions, and a set of triangles is used to represent the produced surfaces. Finally, the tooth flank deviations are evaluated between the built and theoretical tooth surfaces, confirming the correctness of the proposed method.