Experimental investigation and sustainability assessment to evaluate environmentally clean machining of 15-5 PH stainless steel

Abstract

This paper aims to present the environmental issues associated with conventional cutting fluids strategy and find out alternative solutions in terms of environmentally friendly cooling and lubrication techniques with high machining performance. In this view, this paper analyses the cleaner cooling and lubrication techniques, namely dry, MQL, and cryogenic machining with conventional lubrication technique, namely wet machining to reduce the usage of non-renewable energy source and recycle process without losing the productivity. In this context, cutting force, co-efficient of friction (CoF), energy consumption, surface roughness parameters and chip reduction coefficient (CRC) are measured for dry, wet, MQL, and cryogenic machining of 15−5 Precipitation Hardened Stainless Steel (PHSS) with variation in cutting speed and feed rate. Also, a previously applied sustainability assessment algorithm has been implemented to study the effectiveness of these cooling and lubrication strategies. The sustainability assessment includes machining performance as well as sustainable indicators (i.e., waste management, environmental impact as well as operational health and safety) in a single integrated analysis to achieve a balance between the machining efficiency and sustainability effectiveness. At higher value of cutting speed (199 m/min) and feed rate (0.333 mm/rev), 29.26 %, 52.68 % and 53.33 % increment in the value of cutting force were observed in dry, wet and MQL machining in comparison with cryogenic machining respectively. The higher values of CoF and CRC found in dry machining suggest more friction and amount of plastic deformation respectively as compared to other cutting fluid strategies. The 6.27 % higher value of energy consumption was observed in dry machining as compared to other cutting environments. At higher cutting parameters, in cryogenic machining, 6.76 %, 1.8 % and 26.62 % lower surface roughness (Ra) were observed as compared to dry, wet and MQL machining, respectively.