Study of materials effects on the single cutting in ultra-precision raster milling

Ultra-precision raster milling (UPRM) rotates a single crystal diamond tool to discontinuously remove materials from the workpiece and can directly produce freeform surfaces with sub-micrometric form accuracy and nanometric surface finishing. This paper presents theoretical and experimental investigations on the workpiece material effect on single cutting profile in UPRM. Experiments are conducted to study the material effect on cutting profile by single cutting four materials including copper, aluminium alloy 6061, brass and aluminium bronze under the same cutting conditions in UPRM. A characterisation method is presented in the paper to study the effect of different workpiece material on the cutting profiles in UPRM. The experimental results show that copper alloy makes the smallest effect on the single cutting profile because of the lowest elastic recovery ratio while the material effect of aluminium bronze is the highest due to the highest elastic recovery ratio and the highest hardness.