Evaluation of numerical models for predicting surface integrity in metal cutting

Efforts on numerical modelling and simulation of metal cutting operations continue to increase due to the growing need for predicting the machining performance. A significant number of numerical methods, especially the Finite Element (FE) and the Mesh-free methods, are being developed and used to simulate the machining operations. However, the effectiveness of the numerical models to predict the machining performance depends on how accurate are them to represent the actual metal cutting process, and also on the quality and accuracy of the input data used in such models. This paper presents results from a recently conducted benchmark study, which involved evaluation of various numerical predictive models. This study had a major objective to evaluate the effectiveness of the current numerical predictive models for machining performance, focusing on surface integrity. Five representative work materials were carefully selected for this study from a range of most commonly used work materials, along with a wide range of cutting conditions usually found in the published literature. The differences between the predicted results obtained from several numerical models using different FE and Mesh-free codes are evaluated and compared with those obtained experimentally.