Minimum Quantity Lubrication-Alternative to Flood Cutting and Dry Cutting

Abstract

For any machining process cutting tool temperature, surface roughness value of work piece, cutting forces are the performance deciding parameters. These parameters directly, indirectly affect the tool life and thus affect machine cycle time, product cost and productivity. Cutting fluids are used to improve the machining performance however its cost and environment unfriendliness raise several questions. Researchers have documented several adverse health and environment effects of cutting fluids through their work. Plenty are efforts are going on to reduce the cutting fluid costs and to minimize its harmful effect to the environment. There is urgent need to provide sustainable, low cost and productive alternative to conventional machining processes. Minimum quantity lubrication is emerging as a tool to minimize the quantity exposure to the cutting fluids. In present work, low cost minimum quantity lubrication is used to verify its performance in terms of temperature, cutting forces and surface roughness. Results are compared for dry, flood and MQL cutting. Performance of MQL is better as compared to dry and flood cutting.