Titanium Machining Using Indigenously Developed Sustainable Cryogenic Machining Facility

Abstract

This chapter presents details of cryogenic machining of titanium alloys. It discusses different innovative methods used in literature for cryogenic machining of titanium alloys. A detailed methodology is presented to design a sustainable cryogenic fluid delivery setup. It also covers economic aspects of cryogenic machining in comparison to dry machining. Finally, a sustainable liquid nitrogen delivery setup is designed and developed to perform cryogenic machining of Ti-6Al-4V. The design of this retrofittable cryogen delivery solution for a range of available machine tools shall provide a direct cost based impetus for improving machining of such materials, which at present does not exist for indigenous industry. For experimental analyses, three machining process parameters i.e. the cutting speed (v), feed (f) and depth of cut (d), and different machining environment i.e. dry and cryogenic are selected. Response variables selected for this study are surface roughness, resultant force and power consumption. Experiments are designed as per hybrid design of experiments (DoE) technique. Hybrid DoE is a combination of orthogonal array and full factorial methods. To investigate the results, each combination of process parameters are compared under dry and cryogenic machining. Analysis of variance technique (ANOVA) is used to reveal the effect of process parameters on response variables. The results show that better surface finish obtained under cryogenic machining in comparison to dry machining. Results of power consumption suggest suitability of cryogenic machining over dry machining at higher levels of process parameters.