Influence of hexagonal boron nitride additive nanocutting fluid on the machining of AA6061-T6 alloy using minimum quality lubrication

The extravagant usage of cutting fluid affects the environment and operator's health badly. Therefore, a well-established cooling technique minimum quantity lubrication was used in the present investigation in which environment-friendly cutting fluid based on soya bean oil was used. The investigation of the machining performance of soya bean oil-based hexagonal boron nitride nanofluid under minimum quantity lubrication during the milling of aluminum alloy AA6061-T6 was carried out to optimize the machining parameters for minimizing the cutting force and surface roughness. The machining results are further analyzed using Taguchi single-objective optimization, regression and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and multi-response optimization using Desirability Function Analysis (DFA). Furthermore, the mathematical models are developed for cutting force and surface roughness for milling under minimum quantity lubrication using regression analysis, and the models are found to be significant with minimum error. The nanofluid with 0.25 wt% nanoparticle concentration yielded minimum force and surface roughness at optimized machining parameters of 100 m/min, cutting speed, and 400 mm/min feed rate. However, the soya bean-based hexagonal boron nitride nanofluid minimum quantity lubrication machining yields better results than the flood-cutting condition.