M.S. Thesis Presentation by Fevzi Yılmaz

M.S. Thesis Presentation by Fevzi Yilmaz
Department of Industrial Engineering
Bilkent UniversityA recent trend in the manufacturing industry is the production of high value added micro parts which are mainly used in biomedical and electronics industries. It is crucial to develop high precision machine tools and operate them with high efficiency through an intelligent selection of process parameters. However, the knowledge base for micro machining operations is quite limited compared to macro scale machining processes and needs to be further developed. This study focuses on a micro milling process that is capable of producing micro parts with three dimensional features made from engineering materials.

 

In this thesis, modeling and optimization of macro scale turning and micro scale milling operations have been considered. A well known multi pass turning optimization problem from the literature is used to benchmark the performance of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique against nonlinear optimization algorithms. It is shown that acceptable results can be obtained in a short time through PSO. Then, micro scale milling operation is thoroughly investigated through experimental techniques where the influences of machining parameters on the process outputs (machining forces, surface quality, and tool life) have been investigated and factors affecting the process outputs are identified. A minimum unit cost optimization problem is formulated based on the pocketing operation, and machining strategies are proposed for different machining scenarios using the PSO approach. It is shown that significant reductions in machining time and unit cost can be obtained through process optimization.

 

This thesis is supervised by
Asst. Prof. Yigit Karpat