Improving grindability of Ti–6Al–4V through applying environmentally benign cutting fluids using SiC wheel

Consciousness towards detrimental environmental impacts, operator's health and cost constraints has led to the critical consideration of small quantity lubrication to be used for different machining operations. Grinding, a special type of machining operation, is employed to manufacture products having high-dimensional accuracy with close tolerances. However, it is considered to be one of the most environment-unfriendly machining processes that needs reduction in coolant consumption along with the use of unconventional environment-friendly cutting fluids. Moreover, adversities of grinding are manifold when performed on titanium grade 5 which poses difficulty in machining. Grindability of this alloy is tried to improve in this work. Small quantity lubrication with the use of different unconventional and environmentally benign fluids has been employed during grinding with a silicon carbide wheel. Solutions of soap and water, sodium nitrite and propylene glycol are applied. Forces and specific energy needed, morphology of ground surface, grinding ratio, chip-form and so on are observed during the experiments conducted under dry and various small quantity lubrication conditions. The results indicate that all the unconventional fluids accomplish much better results than the usually employed one. Propylene glycol has exhibited the best results among all the environment-friendly fluids considered herein. For example, in comparison with dry grinding, small quantity lubrication with propylene glycol manages to reduce the cutting force components by 21 to 23% while improving the grinding ratio by nearly 5 times. Best surface quality has also been observed while using propylene glycol with the reduction of surface roughness to almost half as compared to dry grinding.