MODELLING AND SIMULATION OF METAL CUTTING BY FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

Metal cutting, or simply machining, is one of the oldest processes for shaping components in the manufacturing industry. It is widely quoted that 15% of the value of all mechanical components manufactured worldwide is derived from machining operations. There are lots of studies to investigate this complex process in both academic and industrial world. Predictions of important process variables such as temperature, cutting forces and stress distributions play significant role on designing tool geometries and optimising cutting conditions. Researchers find these variables by using experimental techniques which makes the investigation very time consuming and expensive. At this point, finite element modelling and simulation becomes main tool. These important cutting variables can be predicted without doing any experiment with finite element method The developed model was implemented in the FEM package ABAQUS as a user material model and used in the investigation of orthogonal metal cutting. The method chosen for the chip formation has a large impact on the result of the simulations. This main objective is to deal with the plane strain 2D Finite Element (FE) modelling of segmented, as well as continuous chip formation while machining AISI 4340 with a negative rake carbide tool and to simulate both the continuous and segmented chips from the same FE model based on FE code ABAQUS/Explicit. Both the adiabatic and coupled temperature displacement analysis has been performed to simulate the right kind of chip formation. It is observed that adiabatic hypothesis plays a critical role in the simulation of segmented chip formation based on adiabatic shearing. The numerical results dealing with distribution of stress, strain and temperature for segmented and continuous chip formations were compared and found to vary considerably from each other. The simulation results were also compared with published experimental results; thus validating the developed model.