Efficiently constructing collision-free regions of tool orientations for holder in five-axis machining of blisk

Blisks with the integral structure are key parts used in new jet engines to promote the performance of aircrafts, which also increases the complexity of tool orientation planning in the five-axis machining. It is an essential task to find the collision-free tool orientation when the tool holder is pushed deep into the channel of blisk to increase rigidity and reduce vibration. Since the radius of the holder varies with the height, the line-visibility is no longer applicable when constructing collision-free regions of tool orientation. In this paper, a method of constructing collision-free regions without interference checking is proposed. The work of finding collision-free regions resorts to solving the local contact curves on the checking surfaces of blisk. And it further transforms into searching the locally tangent points (named critical points) between the holder and surface. Then a tracking-based algorithm is proposed to search the sample critical points on these local contact curves. And the corresponding critical vectors are also calculated synchronously. Besides, the safety allowance, discrete precision and acceptable deviation are introduced in the algorithm to ensure accuracy by controlling the angle between two adjacent critical vectors properly. After that, the searched critical vectors are mapped orderly to two-dimensional space and the collision-free regions are constructed. This method is finally verified and compared with a referenced method. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently construct collision-free regions for holder under the given accuracy.