Performance comparison of dry, flood and vegetable oil based minimum quantity lubrication environments during CNC milling of Aluminium 6061

Abstract

Abstract The minimum quantity lubrication in machining has been emerged as the sustainable manufacturing techniques and being widely explored for industrial applications since last few years. The aim of this paper is to explore the CNC milling performance while machining Aluminium 6061 under three different environments viz. dry, flood and vegetable oil based minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) technique. Taguchi L9 array was used to design the experiments, for three machining input parameters viz. cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut; considering the efficient use of limited resources. A fresh TiAlN coated carbide PVD insert was used in end milling of Aluminium 6061T6 for each experimental run. A total of 27 experiments were performed for dry, flood and MQL environments. Average surface roughness was analysed for each experiment and machining parameters for better surface finish were optimized. It was observed that MQL provides the best surface finish out of all three cooling environments. Tool wear was also found to be reduced significantly in MQL environment as compared to dry and flood techniques. It was concluded that MQL cooling technique can be used as a better alternative to dry or flood cooling method.