A sustainable cooling/lubrication method focusing on energy consumption and other machining characteristics in high-speed turning of aluminum alloy

Abstract

Understanding energy implications and machining performance standards is vital as industries move toward sustainability. Modern machining techniques including high-speed turning are used in the study on aluminum alloy materials. Therefore, this study focuses on the energy consumption and in-depth analysis of machinability criteria in the context of eco-friendly high-speed turning of aluminum alloy. The experiments were performed under ecofriendly cutting conditions dry and minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) conditions and the intricate relationship between machining parameters and cooling conditions was investigated in terms of energy consumption, tool wear, surface roughness and chips morphology. The result reveal that the Ra values exhibited 2.4 times increase in dry machining and an average increase of 2.3 times in MQL machining when the feed rate was increased from 0.2 to 0.4 mm/rev. Moreover, the MQL cooling is helpful in lowering the energy consumption as well as tool wear and surface roughness during the machining operations. MQL machining resulted in a 35% reduction in flank wear and 20% reduction in energy consumption compared to dry machining.