Investigation of the Effects of Cooling and Lubricating Strategies on Tribological Characteristics in Machining of Hybrid Composites

Abstract

Engineering materials are expected to contain physical and mechanical properties to meet the requirements and to improve the functionality according to their application area. In this direction, hybrid composites stand as an excellent option to fulfill these requests thanks to their production procedure. Despite the powder metallurgy method that allows for manufacturing products with high accuracy, machining operations are still required to obtain a final product. On the other hand, such materials are characterized with uncertainties in the structure and extremely hard reinforcement particles that aggravate the machinability. One of the prominent solutions for better machinability of composites is to use evolutionary cooling and lubricating strategies. This study focuses on the determination of tribological behavior of Cu-based, B-Ti-SiCP reinforced, about 5% wt. hybrid composites under milling of several environments, such as dry, minimum quantity lubrication (MQL)-assisted and cryogenic LN2-assisted. Comprehensive evaluation was carried out by considering tool wear, temperature, energy, surface roughness, surface texture and chips morphology as the machinability characteristics. The findings of this experimental research showed that cryogenic cooling improves the tribological conditions by reducing the cutting temperatures, flank wear tendency and required cutting energy. On the other hand, MQL based lubricating strategy provided the best tool wear index and surface characteristics, i.e., surface roughness and surface topography, which is related to spectacular ability in developing the friction conditions in the deformation zones. Therefore, this paper offers a novel milling strategy for Cu-based hybrid composites with the help of environmentally-friendly techniques.

Keywords

• hybrid composites
• tribological performance
• MQL
• cryogenic cooling
• milling
• machining