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Article: Understanding polar coordinate interpolation.
- Article from:
- Modern Machine Shop
- Article date:
- March 1, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Gardner Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As stated last month, whenever a milling cutter must be used to mill around the periphery of a workpiece on a turn/mill center, programming can be quite tricky. In order to make programming simpler for this kind of machining operation, most turning center control manufacturers offer a feature called polar coordinate interpolation. When this feature is used, it makes programming any flat or radius as simple as giving one command. To mill a hex-shaped workpiece, for example, will take only six commands!
In essence, polar coordinate interpolation allows the programmer to flatten out the C axis and view the C axis as a linear axis. Figure 1 shows how the coordinate ...