MECHANISTIC AND FINITE ELEMENT MODEL FOR PREDICTION OF CUTTING FORCES DURING MICRO-TURNING OF TITANIUM ALLOY

Titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V is commonly used in biomedical applications due to its superior properties such as biocompatibility, high strength-to-weight ratio and corrosion resistance. To understand the mechanics of the micro-turning process of these alloys, a mechanistic model has been developed for predicting the cutting forces. A modified Johnson-Cook material model with strain gradient plasticity is used to represent the flow stress of work material. The micro-turning experiments were conducted to verify the cutting forces predicted by mechanistic model. A finite element model is also developed with different shear friction factors and calibrated using experimental results to confirm and interpret the results of mechanistic model. It is inferred that strain rate increases by increasing cutting speed, whereas it decreases with increase in the feed rate due to increase in adiabatic shear band spacing. Since Ti-6Al-4V has low thermal conductivity, when cutting speed increases, there is an increase in the tool-chip interface temperature that leads to decrease in cutting forces. When cutting speed increases, chip morphology changes from discontinuous to continuous, and there is significant deterioration in the surface finish. It is observed that the average cutting force prediction errors for mechanistic and finite element models are 9.69% and 11.45% respectively.