A novel finite element model for thermally induced machining of Ti6Al4V

Titanium alloys, including Ti6Al4V, are considered hard to cut materials due to their low thermal conductivity, low elastic modules and high chemical reactivity. This leads to high cutting forces and high surface roughness. Thermal assisted machining is used to improve the machinability of Ti6Al4V. To improve the performance of thermal assisted machining, this study investigates how are the cutting force, cutting zones temperatures, chip morphology, shear plane angle and strain rate are affected by the cutting speed and the heating element characteristics during thermally assisted machining of Ti6Al4V. A 2D numerical model simulating orthogonal cutting process was created using ABAQUS/Explicit software. In this model, Johnson Cook constitutive model was used to describe the material behavior during cutting process. Also, Johnson Cook damage model was used to simulate chip separation mechanism. After the verification of the model by comparison with results found in the literature, a number of simulations were run at different levels of four factors: cutting speed (40, 60, 80, 100, 120 and 140 m/min), heat source temperature (200, 400 and 600 °C), heating source distance from the cutting tool (0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 mm) and heating source size/diameter (0.6, 0.8 and 1 mm). Taguchi L18 orthogonal mixed level design was used to plan for simulation runs using Minitab software. ANOVA analysis was used to investigate the significance of the four factors. The response table of means and the main effect of means are used to compare between the four factors and find their ranking. Based on 95% confidence Interval (CI), the results show that cutting speed has a significant effect on cutting force, strain rate, chip compression ratio, cutting tool nose temperature, cutting tool and chip temperature in the secondary deformation zone, average chip thickness at peaks and average chip thickness at valleys and average pitch. This conclusion is based on the P-values which are << 0.05 and the contribution which reaches 99.01%. Similarly, based on P-values (< 0.05) and contributions (up to 12.16%), the heating source temperature has a significant effect on average chip thickness at valleys, chip compression ratio and strain rate. The cutting speed has Rank 1 among the four factors affecting cutting force, cutting zones temperatures, chip morphology, shear plane angel and stain rate. The effect of instantaneous heating directly before cutting process is negligible compared to the effect of plastic deformation and fracture mechanism in the cutting zone.