Design and Construction of a Cutting Fluid Two-Way/Multi-Feeding Device for Turning Operation

The effectiveness of a Cutting Fluid (CF) depends to a large extent on the method of its feeding. Therefore, a new device was developed to feed cutting fluids to the cutting area under lathe machining and specifically for turning process. The device can be used as a two-way or multi CF feeding mechanism depending on the number of nozzles used simultaneously for the application of the CF to the cutting zone. The material used for the construction of the device is low carbon steel, except the nozzles and the nozzle base that were made from brass. The device was tested as a two-way cutting fluid feeding mechanism to apply CF (soluble oil) to the cutting zone during the turning of high carbon steel material with a tungsten carbide cutting tool. The experiments were conducted on centre lathe machine model XL400. The results of the experiment indicated that the two-way application of CF is more effective in terms of its reduction in the tool wear, surface roughness and temperature as compared with the standard one-way application of CF. The average values of surface roughness (Ra), the Tool wear (λ) and Temperature (T) were 8.62µm, 0.12mm and 27.12ºC respectively for two-way application of CF as against 9.67µm, 0.15mm and 30.48ºC for standard one-way application of CF. In other words the surface quality was increased by 11%, the tool life was prolonged approximately by 20% and the temperature was reduced by 11% with the two-way application of CF. Thus, the advantage of a two-way CF feeding mechanism over the standard one-way was ascertained. Dry Turning was also conducted for comparison purpose and naturally, the two-way application of CF showed tremendous advantage over the dry turning for the three parameters (Temperature, Surface Roughness and Tool wear) investigated. The temperature, Surface Roughness and Tool Wear for Two-way application of CF were 27.12ºC, 8.62µm, and 0.12mm as against 50.84ºC, 29.25µm and 1.24mm for dry turning respectively.