  During the cutting process, material of the workpiece is continuously being
removed by the cutting tool, which results in a reduction of mass as well as a
displacement in the center of the workpiece mass. When using workpiece sided
force sensors, such as table dynamometers, the total mass and the displacement
of the center of mass affects the force measurement due to gravitational and
inertial effects. The high flexibility of the milling process leads to a
complex change of volume and mass and necessitates the consideration of the
engagement conditions between tool and workpiece along the tool path in order
to estimate changes in mass and center of mass. This paper proposes a method
for estimating the mass loss and the displacement of the center of mass during
multi-axis milling processes. In this method the tool gets numerically sliced
along the tool axis and the workpiece removal for each slice along an arbitrary
tool path gets calculated. To validate the mass loss model, experiments in both
three-axis milling as well as multi-axis milling processes have been conducted.
Since it is difficult to measure the center of mass, validation for the
displacement of the center of mass was done by comparison with data extracted
from CAD. The results show good agreement between the simulated and measured
mass loss using the proposed approach.
