Most commercial CAM S/W systems employ the CL-based tool-path generation method in which a CL (cutter-location) surface is generated from the triangular facet model of a CAD surface. Even though the accuracy of the CL-surface is within the required machining tolerance, the triangular facets in the CL-surface may cause visually recognizable chopping patterns on a machined-surface which have to be removed by an extra polishing work.
Presented in this thesis is a CL-surface fairing method for removing the chapping patterns in the CL-surface. In the proposed fairing method, characteristics of the chopping patterns (or facetizing errors) are identified first and then invalid data-points due to chopping are removed. After this preprocessing, the remaining data points are faired employing fairing operators (e.g., 4th differences and spline-curve templates). The proposed fairing procedure has been applied to a HOOD panel of an automobile to find a promising result. In evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed faring procedure, a maximum-curvature color-map was used as a fairness measure.
