EXPERIMENTAL STUDY IN USING AIR JET ASSISTED COOLING APPROACH FOR MILLING MACHINING

Abstract

In machining, cutting fluid plays a very important role. However, the usage of cutting fluid has been addressing the issues of environmental intrusiveness and occupational hazards especially the cutting fluid used in conventional wet machining. Therefore, pure dry machining has become a reliable choice in machining for some materials. Yet, the pure dry machining process has significant effect on cutting temperature due to no lubrication and cooling effect during the metal cutting process. Hence, the machining assisted with air pressure has arisen as an important alternative technique to increase the production efficiency and to minimise the usage 
of traditional cutting fluid such as water, oil-based cooling agents that contained harmful ingredients. In this study, a new lubrication method called air jet assisted cooling system was fabricated and applied for improving the cooling effect during the pure dry machining. The result from the cutting experiments showed that the air jet assisted cooling system has brought a great improvement on the cutting performance with reducing the cutting temperature and having a better surface finishing on the workpiece. 

Keywords: Air jet assisted cooling, Dry machining, Cutting temperature, Surface finishing, Aluminium alloy, Up-milling process