Experimental investigation of thermal aspects in a cutting tool using comsol and inverse problem

Abstract The direct measurement of the temperature in a machining process is difficult to accomplish due to the movement of the piece as well as the presence of chips. Thus, the use of inverse heat conduction techniques convey a good alternative to obtain these temperatures, since these techniques allow the use of experimental data obtained from accessible regions. This work proposes the use of a nonlinear inverse problem technique in connection with COMSOL to estimate the heat flux and the temperature field on a turning cutting tool in transient regime. The main purpose of the present work is to show the improvements performed in relation to the authors’ previous work to develop the complex geometry of a machining process. Specification function, which is an inverse problem technique, was implemented in a MATLAB program to estimate the heat flux applied on the tool, from the experimental temperature records. Once the heat flux is known, COMSOL is again utilized to obtain the temperature field on the cutting tool. A comparison of the numerical and experimental temperature results validates the methodology.