Workpiece Orientation and Tooling Selection to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Milling Operations

This paper presents two approaches to reduce the environmental impact of a milling process based on the optimal product positioning and orientation within the workspace and a method to assess the optimal tool material. For the first issue the focus is the reduction of the needed electrical power to execute a product specific toolpath: this is influenced by the distribution of the acceleration among the machine axes, whose power consumptions could vary due to the axis’s inertial mass, in case of a 3 axis toolpath, or the travel path in case of 5 axis tollpath. A procedure and a post processor to find the optimal position and orientation is presented and validated experimentally. The second approach is related to the optimal choice of the tooling material: each tool material has a different wear rate, specific cutting power and need of primary energy to be constructed. A method to find the optimal value is presented for two tool materials.