Nanofluid Minimum Quantity Lubrication (NMQL): Overview of Nanoparticle Toxicity and Safer-Design Guidelines

Abstract

Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) has received much attention from the research community as a potential lubricating system to reduce environmental hazards and health issues that can be commonly found in flood cooling/lubricating systems based on metalworking fluids. The addition of nanoparticles in MQL systems (NMQL) has led to improved machining performance, increasing the cooling capability and reducing friction and tool wear, and some researchers have proved the applicability of this type of system for difficult-to-cut materials. However, the mist generated by MQL systems due to both the MQL system itself and the machining operation may pose an additional hazard to operators which is being overlooked by the research community. These hazards become more severe when using nanoparticles, but unfortunately very few works have paid attention to nanoparticle toxicity as applied in MQL systems, and this issue should be clearly understood before encouraging its implementation in industry. Furthermore, current legislation does not help since regulation of permissible exposure limits when dealing with nanoparticles is still ongoing in most cases. In this work, the toxicity of nanoparticles applied in MQL systems is analyzed, and recent research on studies of nanoparticle toxicity both in vitro and in vivo is presented. A relative comparison of toxicity is provided for those nanoparticles that have been reported in the literature as potential additives for MQL. The review is focused on analyzing the main factors of toxicity of nanoparticles which are identified as size, shape, surface properties, agglomeration and solubility. This review presents guidelines for safer nanolubricant formulations, guiding practitioners towards proper NMQL implementations in industry. Furthermore, current occupational exposure limits and recommendations are provided for all the nanoparticles potentially used in MQL systems, which is of interest in terms of work safety.

Keywords

• nanoparticles
• Minimum Quantity Lubrication
• NMQL
• toxicity
• nanolubricants
• safer design