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An alternative for cooling metal cutting
Cetim is involved in an R&D project intended to assess the technical and economic interest of cryogenic machining.
How can the cutting tools of machining processes be cooled? This issue concerns refractory materials which exhibit very low thermal conductivity. Heat does not evacuate from these materials as well as in steel shavings. As the tools are subject to high temperatures, they wear more quickly. The answer may very well lie with cryogenics. The principle is straight forward: replace the lubricants with liquid nitrogen to perform cooling.
Accordingly, Cetim is part of a research and development project financed by the Industry Innovation Fund (F2i - Fonds pour l’innovation dans l’industrie) on cryogenic machining. This research and development programme is geared towards overcoming the technological barriers and studying the economic interest of liquid nitrogen cooling, compared with the conventional lubrication process. As a matter of fact, even though nitrogen can be readily used with turning, its use is more complicated in milling where the liquid must penetrate the spindle. Consequently, there are issues with leak tightness and temperature as the spindle motor is not designed to operate at the freezing temperatures of liquid nitrogen.
The project also focuses on the cutting process in itself in order to understand the mechanisms at play. This is not a simple matter as the conventional cutting mechanisms are not fully known.
A milling demonstrator should be manufactured in the near future with a view to studying all these issues.
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