Sustainable machining of Inconel 718 using minimum quantity lubrication: Artificial intelligence-based process modelling

Abstract

Governments and industries are developing aggressive policies to reduce carbon emissions and shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. On the other hand, industries struggle to reduce energy consumption and depend on production lot sizes to control energy requirements. In this regard, energy-efficient processing through CNC machine tools can potentially influence energy demand and requires energy-aware power consumption strategies for machining processes. For manufacturing a single product, predicting energy demand can be decisive in determining parametric control and other factors. Previously analytical models have been largely used to model machining requirements and energy demand. However, these models largely depend on parameterization and do not facilitate the integration of external sub-systems. Therefore, in this paper, an artificial intelligence-based power reduction strategy is developed and implemented on single material (Inconel 718), four control parameters (cutting speed, feed rate, depth of cut and flow rate) and two sub-systems (minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) and nanofluids-based minimum quantity lubrication (NF-MQL)). The paper employs four machine learning algorithms,’ K-Nearest Neighbor’, ‘Gaussian Regression’, ‘Decision Tree’, and ‘Logistic Regression’, to evaluate their functionality in predicting power consumption (Pc) of CNC machining systems using a real experimental data set. As per evaluation based on five performance metrics (R-square, MSE, RMSE, MAE, and MedAE), ‘Decision Tree’ has achieved the most accurate power consumption predictions. The comparative results highlight ‘Decision Tree’ as the most better predictor with the optimal max_depth of 2 showing Pc MQL R2 of 0.915 and Pc NF-MQL R2 of 0.931.