Gear manufacturing using power-skiving method on six-axis CNC turn-mill machining center

Power-skiving is an efficient method for the manufacturing of high accuracy gears, particularly internal gears. However, dedicated power-skiving machine tools are normally very expensive. Accordingly, the present study proposes a simple methodology for automatically and systematically generating the NC code required to manufacture gears using the power-skiving method on a conventional six-axis CNC turn-mill machining center. The main factors determining the linear cutting speed of the power-skiving tool are analyzed and a modified D-H notation is used to evaluate the error characteristics of the machine tool system. The validity of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by machining an internal gear on a DMG MORI NTX1000 six-axis CNC turn-mill machining center. The results confirm that the proposed approach provides a simple yet effective method for implementing the power-skiving technique on a conventional six-axis CNC turn-mill machining center.