Aluminum is a soft material, which shows a very complicated deformation in cutting.
This paper describes dry othogonal cutting of commercial pure aluminum at low speed for the study of its cutting mechanism. The distribution of residual stresses on the surface layer was measured by X-ray diffractiometry and the effects of cutting conditions (such as nose radius of tool edge, depth of cut, and cutting speed) on the residual stresses were discussed.
The results obtained were summarized as follows:
In low speed orthogonal cutting of aluminum, all the residual stresses near the surface layer appeared on the compression side. Though the nose radius of tool edge increased beyond a range of some value (60 μ in this paper), there were observed no effects of increase in nose radius on the residual stresses. Therefore, the substantial nose radius concerned with cutting was nearly constant (6070 μ in this paper) even if the built-up edge grew up and adhered to the tool nose for increasing nose radius.
When the depth of cut increased, the residual stresses were penetrated more deeply and the stress values also increased.
In the range of such a low cutting speed, there appeared little effects of cutting speed on the residual stress. However, the residual stresses slightly increased with the increase in cutting speed.
