A novel conjugate heat transfer approach to determine the temperature distribution in single-point cutting tool under different conditions

Measurement of accurate temperature of the tooltip, rake face, and flank face during the machining operation has always been difficult and a topic of interest among researchers. Thermal modeling for determining the temperature distribution across the tool surface is one of the approaches to determining the other physical properties associated with temperature in machining. Various attempts have been made to predict the temperature during machining operations. The exact determination of temperature can predict the tool wear and minimize the tooling cost and ideal time in the metal cutting industries. The present work describes the development of an alternative approach for the online tool temperature measurement. The four conditions namely dry cutting with different boundary conditions, flooded water cooling, and the mist flow environment have been considered in the turning operation. Computational fluid dynamics has been used to determine the temperature distribution on tool inserts under different machining environments. The prediction model is developed to compute the temperature across the profile through different numerical equations. Furthermore, the simulated data has also been validated through experimentation with turning operation using a carbide tool and AISI 304 stainless steel as work material. The experimental results are in close agreement with simulated results and have a variation of 25% to 35% in all the machining environments. Among all the cases, the lowest temperature has been recorded in flood water cooling followed by the machining under a mist environment as compared to dry conditions.