On the effectiveness of Finite Element simulation of orthogonal cutting with particular reference to temperature prediction

Finite Element simulation of orthogonal cutting is nowadays assuming a large relevance; in fact a very large number of papers may be found out in technical literature on this topic. In recent years, numerical simulation was performed to investigate various phenomena such as chip segmentation, force prediction and tool wear. On the other hand, some drawbacks have to be highlighted; due to the geometrical and computational complexity of the updated-Lagrangian formulation mostly used in FE codes, a cutting time of only a few milliseconds can be effectively simulated. Therefore, steady-state thermal conditions are not reached and the simulation of the thermal phenomenon may be ineffective. In order to overcome such problem two different approaches are proposed in this paper. The former is based on a pure thermal simulation once the thermal flow on the tool is properly calculated. The latter, on the contrary, is based on an artificial modification of the heat transfer coefficient at the interface between the chip and the tool in the thermo-mechanical simulation. Both of the proposed methodologies are discussed in the paper, highlighting the advantages and the drawbacks of each of them.