MicroMilling on Titanium Alloy - Janjua, Khurram Mehmood; Supervisor : Dr. Muhammad Jawad Aslam (Islamabad : SMME- NUST, 2022)
Titanium and its alloys have wide applications due to their remarkably high toughness, biocompatibility, good corrosion resistance and high tensile strength (especially at higher temperatures) despite being very light weight. TiAl6V4 is the most commonly used Titanium alloy in the industry. Titanium is considered one of the more difficult to machine materials due to which a lot of research input has been in the direction of determining the optimum machining parameters for it. Purpose of Our research work was to further add on to previously conducted research in micromilling of Ti alloys. Goal of this research was micromilling on titanium alloy (TiAl6V4) by developing a testing regime with help of Taguchi Method for design of experimentation and analysis and then analyze and characterize how varying machining parameters (RPM, Feed Rate and Depth of Cut) in the testing regime effect surface roughness and tool wear. Within the scope of our research parameters the experimental results showed that slot depth was the major contributing factor, followed by spindle speed, in determining the surface roughness values while feed per tooth also minimally affected surface roughness. Increasing depth of cut adversely affected the surface roughness whereas increasing spindle speed and feed per tooth seemed to have an initially decreasing trend, however at the highest values for each of these parameters the values of surface roughness showed an adverse/increasing trend which may be attributed to a combination of increased tool wear and higher initial cutting forces. In case of tool wear spindle speed was the main contributing factor, with increasing spindle speed adversely affecting tool wear. This is understandable as machining operation was performed in dry conditions and uncoated 0.5 mm two flute tool was being used. Feed per tooth and depth of cut seem to have minor/negligible effect on tool wear.
Keywords: MS Mechanical Engineering