CALCULATION OF TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTIONS IN MACHINING USING A HYBRID FINITE-ELEMENT - BOUNDARY-ELEMENT METHOD

The temperature distribution generated at the tool-chip interface during machining has been found to greatly influence the cratering of carbide tools. Owing to the smallness of scale and the high cutting speeds and temperatures, it is very difficult to measure machining-temperature distributions accurately. While the tool-chip thermocouple technique has been used often, it is not very convenient to implement. Moreover, it can only give a sort of average tool-chip interface temperature, which is not as useful as the temperature distribution along the tool-chip interface, the latter having been shown to govern the onset and growth of cratering wear at the rake face of the tool. Hence, there arises a need to develope an accurate method for calculating machining temperature distributions. The finite-element method (FEM) has been used suitably for this purpose. However, to speed up the computations and to facilitate automatic mesh generation, the boundary-element method (BEM) could be employed to model the tool region. This paper describes a FEM/BEM hybrid formulation for the problem of calculating machining temperature distributions. Results obtained are compared with experimental results available in the literature, fairly good agreement being obtained.