PSI - Issue 53

Francisco Matos et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 53 (2024) 270–277

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Francisco Matos et al. / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2023) 000–000

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Fig. 5: Cutting fluid velocity distribution: a) front view; b) half plane view; c) cutting fluid supply in operation.

5. Conclusions and future work

Additive manufacturing reduces the design constraints on coolant channel course, allowing to avoid sharp-edged transitions and enabling to direct the cutting fluid to the cutting edge. The presented work explored the feasibility of additively manufacturing a milling tool incorporating conformal refrigeration channels, high teeth number within a hollow interchangeable body. The following conclusions were draw: • The production of a milling tool featuring internal refrigeration channels with small diameters revealed to be feasible through LPBF. This research additionally validates and suggests the usage of a methodology for the production of specially design cutting tools (i.e. intricate geometries), highly relevant for small series production of milling tool bodies. • Additive manufacturing has allowed for the creation of an intricate and detailed part, featuring a significant number of small teeth, which would have been exceptionally challenging to produce using conventional man ufacturing methods. By consolidating the production of the tool into a single step, AM minimizes the need for intricate machining, thereby optimizing both time and resource utilization. It additionally validates the usage of a methodology for the production of specially design cutting tools (i.e. intricate geometries), highly relevant for small series. • The good alignment between the numerical and the fluid dispersion observations underscores the e ff ectiveness of computational fluid dynamics as a valuable tool for the design and optimization of coolant channels. The present work has highlighted the necessity for further research particularly in terms of experimental testing such as performance benchmark of the developed tool through milling tests with force acquisition and wear tendencies benchmark. Coupled with experimental testing, a detailed analysis of the vibration behavior of the cutting tool is also a future research topic. In further investigations the use of computer tomography could be used to better study the dimensional accuracy of AM internal channels. The surface roughness of the cooling channels did not appear to be considerably high, but given that lowering channel roughness would improve the cutting fluid supply, post processing of the coolant channels with abrasive flow machining can be considered a future research area.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding from Project Hi-rEV—Recuperac¸a˜o do Setor de Componentes Au tomo´veis (C644864375-00000002), cofinanced by Plano de Recuperac¸a˜o e Resilieˆncia (PRR), Repu´blica Portuguesa, through NextGeneration EU.