Determination of the Tool’s Trajectory for the Manufacturing of the Profile of a Cam

This paper discusses the determination of the position of the cutting tool in the manufacturing process of a cam. The input data are the coordinates of certain points of cam’s profile and the radius of the cutting tool. Using these coordinates, the authors calculate approximates for the coordinates of the center of the osculating circle of the profile of cam at certain positions. The position of the manufacturing tool is determined considering that the tool is tangent at the osculating circle at the contact point. Two variants are selected for the cam: one variant considers the cam as it results in the synthesis process; the second variant considers the cam obtained by applying the Jarvis March in order to be a convex one. For both variants the trajectory of the cutting tool is determined and the obtained numerical results are compared.