A new cutting tool filled with metallic lattice and design method for vibration suppression in milling

Enhancing the vibration suppression performance of cutting tools is crucial for achieving high-performance cutting of difficult-to-machine materials. This paper presents a novel cutting tool as well as its design method for vibration suppression in milling process. By incorporating a high-damping lattice structure into the cutting tool, the dynamic stiffness of the spindle-holder-tool system can be effectively increased based on the dynamic absorber effect. To achieve this goal, the natural frequency of the cutting tool filled with metallic lattice is tuned with the spindle-holder subassembly by altering the geometric parameters of the metallic lattice. A comprehensive dynamic model of the spindle-holder-tool system, considering the complex tool geometries, is developed to accurately analyze this system’s behavior and a design procedure is proposed to optimize the cutting tool. The geometric parameters of the lattice structure in the cutting tool are optimized based on the dynamic model, while the cell type of the high-damping lattice is selected by experiments. The proposed cutting tool is additively manufactured using the selective laser melting technique, and a comparison is made with a conventional indexable cutting tool with a solid tool body. Both simulations and impact hammer tests demonstrate an increase of 18.3% in the dynamic stiffness of the proposed cutting tool filled with metallic lattice compared with the conventional indexable cutting tool. Furthermore, a large number of milling tests are carried out on titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V to validate the vibration suppression performance of the cutting tool filled with metallic lattice. Experimental results show that the stability limit corresponding to the proposed cutting tool can be doubled compared with the conventional indexable cutting tool.