What's The Difference Between Ultrasonic Cutting Technology And Traditional Processing Technology?
Ultrasonic Cutting Technology is a process technology that has emerged in the past 20 years.
It uses the energy of ultrasonic vibration to cut materials. The purpose is to more effectively and accurately process composite materials that are more and more widely used in the field of aerospace manufacturing, such as glass fiber. , carbon fiber, Kevlar fiber, various honeycomb materials, prepreg fiber materials and various foam materials, etc.
The difference between Ultrasonic Cutting Technology and Traditional Processing Technology:
The basic principle of the traditional high-speed milling and drilling process is to use the machine tool spindle to generate high-speed rotation, and then use the milling head (or drill) to break the material along the edge of the workpiece, so that the workpiece can be formed or separated. Due to the material damage caused by the high-speed rotation of the tool, this processing method will generate a large amount of dust in the processing area, and the high-speed rotating tool will also leave burrs on the surface of the workpiece. In addition, the effect of the lateral force of the spindle during feeding will cause temporary deformation of the workpiece material, thereby affecting the surface quality and dimensional accuracy of the workpiece.
Finally, due to the influence of the lateral force of the spindle, the fixing method between the workpiece and the table (equivalent to the clamping when machining metal workpieces) is often complicated by the use of strong chemical adhesives. After processing, the process of removing the adhesive is not only time-consuming and polluting the environment, but also damages the processed workpieces, resulting in increased costs.
The process of ultrasonic cutting is completely different. First of all, the key to ultrasonic cutting is "cutting", not the "cutting" of conventional machine tools. To put it figuratively, ultrasonic cutting is like cutting paper with scissors or cutting leather with a knife, without the debris of the workpiece. Compared with conventional "cutting and cutting", the ultrasonic cutting head can apply 20-30kHz vibration energy to the scissors or cutting knife to help open the molecular structure inside the material. Precisely because of this feature, the tool can divide the material more easily during the cutting process, and the cutting speed is much higher than that of traditional milling.
Traditional fiber material cutting methods include disc knife cutting, broach cutting and cutting with reciprocating knives. Their common disadvantages include:
(2) The cutting accuracy is not so high. During the cutting process of the tool, the lateral force is large, which easily causes the deformation of the workpiece material, which directly affects the surface accuracy. In addition, some small surfaces are not easy to process.
(3) Sticky knife. The friction and thermal effects of traditional machining in the cutting process often cause the phenomenon of sticking to the knife, resulting in a decrease in cutting quality.
(4) The tool and cutting head have a large loss. Due to the large mechanical friction during the cutting process, the loss of the tool and the cutting head is very large, so the service life is limited and the maintenance cost is also high.
(5) Cutting restrictions. The biggest weakness of traditional cutting methods is that they cannot process certain high-toughness materials. The most typical case is that the traditional cutting method is not suitable for the processing of Kevlar materials and the emerging dry UD materials.
