MQL-Assisted Hard Turning of AISI D2 Steel with Corn Oil: Analysis of Surface Roughness, Tool Wear, and Manufacturing Costs

Abstract

Precision hard turning (HT) gained more and more attention in the cutting industry in the last years due to continuous pressure of the global market for reducing costs, minimizing the environmental and health issues, and achieving a cleaner production. Therefore, dry cutting and minimal quantity lubrication (MQL) became widely used in manufacturing to meet the environmental issues with respect to harmful cutting fluids (CFs). Vegetable oils, in MQL machining, are a promising solutions to petroleum-based CFs; however, the effects and performance on surface roughness and tool wear in HT with ceramic inserts remain unclear. To address this limitation, hardened AIDI D2 steel and pure corn oil, rich in saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids, cheap and widely available, have been used to conduct dry and MQL experiments at different cutting speed and feeds. Results show that corn oil is suitable as cutting lubricant in HT, creating a strong anti-wear and anti-friction lubricating film which improves the roughness with 10–15% and tool life with 15–20%, therefore reducing costs. Best surface roughness values (Ra = 0.151 μm, Rz = 0.887 μm, Rpk = 0.261 μm) were obtained at 180 m/min and 0.1 mm/rev. The analysis of variance shows that corn oil has statistical significance on roughness, validating the results.