Sustainable Machining for Difficult-to-cutting Materials

Dear colleagues,

In the context of the international strategy for peak carbon dioxide emissions, sustainable machining has become a hot topic in the manufacturing industry. The use of cutting fluid during the machining process can effectively reduce the machining temperature, thereby solving the problem of part burns at the high thermal coupling boundary. The use of cutting fluid in manufacturing has been widespread for hundreds of years, with an annual global consumption of over 4 million tons of cutting fluid. However, most of these cutting fluids are mineral oil-based lotion, which are unfriendly to the environment and non renewable energy, posing a huge challenge to sustainable machining. Minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) can reduce cutting fluid usage by over 90% and is an effective alternative to traditional flood cooling lubrication. It is increasingly being reported and preliminarily validated. However, MQL only relies on high-pressure gas to remove heat from the cutting area, which is limited to the processing of ordinary material parts with low cutting force and specific energy. Faced with the cutting and grinding of difficult-to-cutting materials (including high toughness materials such as nickel based high-temperature alloys/titanium alloys, hard-brittle materials such as engineering ceramics, and metal based/ceramic based/resin based composite materials with high hardness and toughness), due to the extremely high energy density in cutting, MQL still cannot solve the technical bottleneck of insufficient heat transfer capacity, which limits the application of difficult-to-cutting materials in fields such as aerospace, precision molds, marine equipment, and rail transportation. In recent years, researchers have attempted various emerging sustainable green processing technologies to address the challenge of sustainable manufacturing of difficult-to-cutting materials, including nano-biolubricant MQL machining, multi energy field (including ultrasonic field, electrostatic field, magnetic field, etc.) assisted machining, low-temperature assisted machining, laser assisted machining, micro textured cutting tools and grinding wheels, aiming to improve the processing performance of difficult-to-cutting materials (such as energy saving, improving efficiency and quality, and suppressing processing defects). Based on this, the author team has planned a special issue titled Sustainable Machining for Difficult-to-cutting Materials, aiming to reveal the penetration and film formation mechanism of bio lubricants in the cutting and grinding zone, the removal mechanism of difficult-to-cutting materials in cutting and grinding with multi energy fields, low temperatures, and laser assistance, the preparation and machining performance of micro textured cutting tools and grinding wheels, and to solve the sustainable machining problem of difficult-to-cutting materials.

Topics include but are not limited to:
Nickel based alloy cutting and grinding
Titanium alloys cutting and grinding
Hard-brittle materials cutting and grinding
Composite materials cutting and grinding
Nano-biolubricant MQL machining
Ultrasonic vibration assisted machining
Electrostatic atomization cutting and grinding
Magnetic field assisted cutting and grinding
Cryogenic air MQL machining
Laser assisted machining
Micro textured cutting tools and grinding wheels