Assessment of water-based fluids with additives in grinding disc cutting process

Abstract

Application of cutting fluids in grinding disc cutting process (GDCP) plays a significant role in minimizing production cost and energy. However, GDCP is significantly different from the grinding wheel grinding process (GWGP) with its very thin disc (3.5 mm), large diameter (400 mm), large cutting depth (several and even ten of millimeters) and no cutting fluids, which lead to a lot of environmental pollution such as sparking, chips splashing, smoke, dust and so on. In this regard, atomization application of water-based cutting fluids is good choice due to less environmental threat in addition to high thermal conductivity and supreme cooling/lubricating efficiency. Besides some eco-friendly properties of additives such as surfactant and graphene, application of such additives eliminates the need for toxic additives used frequently in the industry. Hence, in this study, four types of environmentally friendly water-based cutting fluids (W, W-S, W-G, W-G-S) are prepared by ultrasonic stirring of water, surfactant (sodium alcohol ether sulfate, SAES) and graphene, then their atomization applications are assessed in GDCP of AISI 1045, as one of the most common and representative material in industry application. To optimize these cutting fluids, G-ratio, Fx-Fy and cutting tilt are compared with those of dry cutting using joint analysis of specific heat, viscosity, wettability, permeability and two-direction force. Also, agglomeration of graphene is proposed to reveal the unexpected reduction in lubrication performance and finally a cutting fluid is developed for minimizing the loss of grinding disc. The obtained results of four types of cutting fluids manifest that the proposed W-S can maximally improve G-ratio by amount of 77.6%, reduce line span by amount of 34.5% and cutting tilt by amount of 14.8% compared with conventional dry cutting.