Development of a Simulation Model to Investigate Tool Wear in Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Machining

Titanium alloys like Ti‑6Al‑4V have a low density, a very high strength and are highly resistant to corrosion. However, the positive qualities in combination with the low heat conductivity have disadvantageous effects on mechanical machining and on cutting in particular. Ti‑6Al‑4V forms segmented chips for the whole range of cutting velocities which influences tool wear. Thus, optimization of the manufacturing process is difficult. To obtain this goal the chip segmentation process and the tool wear are studied numerically in this article. Therefore, a FEM model was developed which calculates the wear rates depending on state variables from the cutting simulation, using an empirical tool wear model. The segmentation leads to mechanical and thermal load variations, which are taken into consideration during the tool wear simulations. In order to evaluate the simulation results, they are compared with experimentally obtained results for different process parameters.