New stochastic wear law to predict the abrasive flank wear and tool life in machining process

Tool wear and tool failure are some of the main critical problems in industrial manufacturing fields since they affect the quality of the machined part and raise production costs. Improving our knowledge of wear mechanisms and capabilities of wear prediction are therefore of great importance in the machining process. Abrasion, adhesion and diffusion are usually identified as the three main wear modes at the tool-chip and the tool-workpiece interfaces. From an experimental point of view, the analysis of mechanisms that govern the wear process is still difficult to conduct. The objective of this research work is then to develop a wear modeling focusing on the abrasive wear mode at the tool-workpiece interface. This wear phenomenon is assumed to be closely linked to the microstructure's material workpiece and caused by hard conical particles trapped into the contact between the cutting tool and the workpiece. The proposed model is based on an analytical approach including a statistical description governing the distribution of particles with conical shape embedded in the contact area. The volume of the removed material per unit time was chosen in this study as the main parameter to describe abrasive flank wear mode. A parameter Vb(0) was introduced as the sudden flank wear which occurs in the former few cutting instants. A parametric study has been conducted that highlights the slight effect of the adopted value. The effect of the cutting conditions (cutting speed, pressure) at the tool flank that has a major influence on the wear rate, was deduced from a numerical study on the 42CrMo4/WC-Co tool-workpiece combination. Finally, a wear criterion has been proposed to estimate the tool life in order to address the concerns of industries.