Pulsating minimum quantity lubrication assisted high speed turning on bio-medical Ti-6Al-4V ELI Alloy: An experimental investigation

Abstract

Machining of bio-medical Ti-6Al-4V ELI grade is categorized in difficult to cut metal alloys due to its lower thermal conductivity and highly reactive in nature at elevated temperature. However, to improve the machinability of this alloy, controlling the temperature during cutting action is a challenging task. On this context, current work introduced a novel cooling strategy named as pulsating minimum quantity lubrication technique to investigate the surface roughness, surface texture (surface topology, surface profile, amplitude distribution curve, Bearing area curve, and Power spectrum), tool-work temperature, and flank wear in high-speed CNC turning of Ti-6Al-4V ELI Alloy. Feed is the leading influencing term towards surface roughness, pulse time contributing the highest impact towards tool-work temperature while flank wear is largely influenced by cutting speed. Abrasion, notch wear, adhesion and diffusion mode of wear is found.