Assessment of cutting forces and hole quality in drilling Al2024 aluminium alloy: experimental and finite element study

3D Finite Element Modelling of Cutting Forces in Drilling Fibre Metal Laminates and Experimental Hole Quality Analysis

“…Comparing surface roughness results with the ones from our previous work on drilling thicker GLARE laminates [30] showed that the surface roughness is likely to be slightly higher in thinner samples with the increase of feed rate. At spindle speed of 3000 rpm, the surface roughness was higher in thinner laminates, while at spindle speeds of 6000 and 9000 rpm, the surface roughness tended to be higher in thicker laminates which could be due to the increase in cutting temperatures and vibrations with depth.…”

“…Comparing cutting forces results with the ones from our previous work on drilling thicker GLARE laminates from the same grade (GLARE 2B 11/10 and GLARE 2B 8/7) [30]. Both torque and thrust force increased with the increase of workpiece thickness, which could be due to improper conditions of chip evacuation and increased heat which could in return increase the cutting forces [31].…”

“…A part of the mesh study looked into the effect of element size within the FE model on the prediction of cutting forces. To provide baseline for mesh study, the influence of meshed element size on the simulated results in the plane and through the thickness of the workpiece was studied using the spindle speed of 6000 rpm and the feed rate of 6000 rpm and 600 mm/min [30]. A planar (in the plane of workpiece) mesh size of 0.1885 mm × 0.1885 mm was used for meshing the circular region at the centre of the workpiece.…”

“…Enhanced hour-glassing and distortion control options were used to prevent zero-energy modes and to prevent the workpiece elements from distorting excessively, respectively [42]. The effective plastic displacement at failure used for Al2024-T3 sheets was set to u pl f ¼ 1:8e−5m [30]. Selective mass scaling was used to accelerate the computation -the mass of those meshed elements which affected the simulation time greatly was increased resulting in the overall increase in the mass of workpiece by no more than 1 %.…”

“…In addition, the tribological behaviour of TiAlN coatings reported that it had a coefficient of friction μ = 0.7 [48]. Previous studies on modelling the machining process of Al2024-T alloy used coefficient of friction between 0.3 and 0.7 [30,[49][50][51]. Therefore, the coefficient of friction of 0.7 was selected after a vigorous mesh study where it was varied from 0.4 to 0.8 used in previous studies.…”