Effects of cutting conditions on forces and force coefficients in plunge milling operations

The modeling of milling forces is a crucial issue to understand milling processes. In the literature, many force models and experiments to identify force coefficients are found. The objective of this article is to develop a new approach, based on the traditional average force method, able to measure and compute the cutting coefficients for end mills used in plunging operations. This model has been used to evaluate the effect of the radial engagement on the cutting coefficients themselves, proposing a new strategy to update these values for different cutting parameters. This dependency of the cutting coefficient is particularly important for the determination of the stability lobe diagrams, used to predict the chatter conditions. In this article, the method to assess the cutting coefficients, the results of the experimental tests, and the effect of condition-dependent cutting coefficients on process stability are presented.