Rough Cutting of Sculptured Surface Built from Scattered Data

The sculptured surface is approximated by a regular mesh of rectangular facets.A set of equidistant horizontal planes are assigned to intersect the blank of machined part,resulting in a series of contours,which demarcate the feasible cutting regions of each layer of material removal.The desired cutter path is computed through NC programming.This approach successfully solves the problem of layered milling for sculptured surfaces with nested islands.