High speed turning of compacted graphite iron using controlled modulation

Tyler Paul Stalbaum, Purdue University

Abstract

Compacted graphite iron (CGI) is a material which emerged as a candidate material to replace cast iron (CI) in the automotive industry for engine block castings. Its thermal and mechanical properties allow the CGI-based engines to operate at higher cylinder pressures and temperatures than CI-based engines, allowing for lower fuel emissions and increased fuel economy. However, these same properties together with the thermomechanical wear mode in the CGI-CBN system result in poor machinability and inhibit CGI from seeing wide spread use in the automotive industry. In industry, machining of CGI is done only at low speeds, less than V = 200 m/min, to avoid encountering rapid wear of the cutting tools during cutting. Studies have suggested intermittent cutting operations such as milling suffer less severe tool wear than continuous cutting. Furthermore, evidence that a hard sulfide layer which forms over the cutting edge in machining CI at high speeds is absent during machining CGI is a major factor in the difference in machinability of these material systems. The present study addresses both of these issues by modification to the conventional machining process to allow intermittent continuous cutting. The application of controlled modulation superimposed onto the cutting process – modulation-assisted machining (MAM) – is shown to be quite effective in reducing the wear of cubic boron nitride (CBN) tools when machining CGI at high machining speeds (> 500 m/min). The tool life is at least 20 times greater than found in conventional machining of CGI. This significant reduction in wear is a consequence of reduction in the severity of the tool-work contact conditions with MAM. The propensity for thermochemical wear of CBN is thus reduced. It is found that higher cutting speed (> 700 m/min) leads to lower tool wear with MAM. The MAM configuration employing feed-direction modulation appears feasible for implementation at high speeds and offers a solution to this challenging class of industrial machining applications. This study's approach is by series of high speed turning tests of CGI with CBN tools, comparing conventional machining to MAM for similar parameters otherwise, by tool wear measurements and machinability observations.

Degree

M.S.

Advisors

Chandrasekar, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Industrial engineering|Materials science

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