Spindle Speed Variation for the Suppression of Regenerative Chatter

Summary

A phenomenon commonly encountered during machining operations is chatter. It manifests itself as a vibration between workpiece and cutting tool, leading to poor dimensional accuracy and surface finish of the workpiece and to premature failure of the cutting tool. A chatter suppression method that has received attention in recent years is the spindle speed variation method, whereby greater widths of cut are achieved by modulating the spindle speed continuously. By adapting existing mathematical techniques, a perturbative method is developed in this paper to obtain finite-dimensional equations in order to systematically study the mechanism of spindle speed variation for chatter suppression. The results indicate both modest increase of stability and complex nonlinear dynamics close to the new stability boundary. The method developed in this paper can readily be applied to any other system with time-delay characteristics.