Design and Implementation of a Novel Single-Driven Ultrasonic Elliptical Vibration Assisted Cutting Device

In this paper, a novel single-driven ultrasonic elliptical vibration cutting (SDUEVC) device with a succinct structure and a simple assembly is proposed and investigated. A tailored horn with a tilted-slot structure was employed in the designed SDUEVC device. Also, the elliptical trajectory formation mechanism of the designed SDUEVC device was described by using the theory of mechanical vibration. Furthermore, the finite element method (FEM) was used to optimize the tilted-slot structure parameters and there are four parameters selected as the optimization factors. The results indicated that the proposed SDUEVC device can generate larger vertical amplitude than previous SDUEVC devices, which provides an important and positive effect for the cutting performance of the proposed SDUEVC device. According to the optimized results, a prototype SDUEVC device was fabricated and its vibration characteristic was tested. When the excitation signal voltage was 500 V_p-p, the test results indicated that the amplitudes in the axial and vertical directions were 8.7 μm and 6.8 μm, respectively. Furthermore, an elliptical trajectory was generated at the cutting tool tip. Finally, the proposed SDUEVC device was used to fabricate microdimple patterns as the initial application to confirm the feasibility of the proposed SDUEVC device.