Process instabilities due to regenerative chatter pose significant limitations on the achievable material removal rates and thus on the profitability of machining operations. Stability lobe diagrams serve to exploit the maximum yet stable cutting depth and can be determined either analytically or experimentally. While analytical approaches suffer from inaccuracies because of the assumptions made for the specific models, experimental stability lobe diagrams require extensive cutting tests. Therefore, this paper introduces a new automated experimental method for determining stability lobe diagrams in milling with reduced effort regarding time. A closed-loop system is designed, containing a sensor-based online chatter detection along with a strategy to set parameters for subsequent cuts based on the stability boundaries known at each iteration. Both cuts with continuously increasing cutting depth and varied spindle speed are deployed to ensure fast detection of stability limits. The method is tested for a slot milling use case and the results are compared to a conventionally obtained stability lobe diagramyielding a significantly reduction in required time(-90 %) and resources (-67 %) whilst maintaining good accuracy.The reduced effort qualifies the proposed method as a tool to rapidly deliver maximum productive yet stable cutting parameters for optimization of existing or enhanced planning of new manufacturing processes.
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