An Efficient Third-Order Full-Discretization Method for Prediction of Regenerative Chatter Stability in Milling

The prediction of regenerative chatter stability has long been recognized as an important issue of concern in the field of machining community because it limits metal removal rate below the machine's capacity and hence reduces the productivity of the machine. Various full-discretization methods have been designed for predicting regenerative chatter stability. The main problem of such methods is that they can predict the regenerative chatter stability but do not efficiently determine stability lobe diagrams (SLDs). Using third-order Newton interpolation and third-order Hermite interpolation techniques, this study proposes a straightforward and effective third-order full-discretization method (called NI-HI-3rdFDM) to predict the regenerative chatter stability in milling operations. Experimental results using simulation show that the proposed NI-HI-3rdFDM can not only efficiently predict the regenerative chatter stability but also accurately identify the SLD. The comparison results also indicate that the proposed NI-HI-3rdFDM is very much more accurate than that of other existing methods for predicting the regenerative chatter stability in milling operations. A demonstrative experimental verification is provided to illustrate the usage of the proposed NI-HI-3rdFDM to regenerative chatter stability prediction. The feature of accurate computing makes the proposed NI-HI-3rdFDM more adaptable to a dynamic milling scenario, in which a computationally efficient and accurate chatter stability method is required.