Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

Accurate models of twist drills are needed for Finite Element simulations of the drilling process. Existing drill designing methods rely extensively on discretized analytical equations to describe the drill and different sets of equations need to be formulated as the drill design changes. This paper presents a method to create accurate models of two-flute conical twist drills using solid-modeling techniques which addresses some of these shortcomings. Boolean operations are used to mimic the drill manufacturing steps and generate the fully designed drill. The drills generated by this method have been used in Finite Element simulations to study the effect of drill point geometry on burr formation in drilling.