Comparison of Machining Simulations of Aerospace Alloy Al6061 using Lagrangian and SPH Techniques

Abstract

Metal cutting is considered one of the most widely used technique in the manufacturing industry and a number of studies are going on for the investigation about this complex process by the collaboration of academia with the industries. The most significant advantage which one get from FEM simulations is the optimization of the cutting conditions by using the predictions of the process variables such as cutting force, temperature variations and residual stress distributions within a short span of time. The FEM simulations dominates over experimental techniques by cost effectiveness and time consumption. The current era no more belongs to the hit and trial procedures that were being adopted earlier in experimental procedures of metal cutting. This thesis covers a study on the comparison of the machining simulation capabilities of Lagrangian model with the SPH model in 3D cutting regime for the workpiece Al6061-T6 in ABAQUS/Explicit 6.14. The comparison between the aforementioned models have been done on the basis of cutting forces, chip thickness, shear angle, chip separation criterion, computing resources and surface roughness for the turning process. The simulation results obtained from both the models have been compared with the experimental results. The LAG and SPH model results about the cutting forces are approximately close to the experimental results. The LAG model can be used for the prediction of surface roughness and chip morphology while the SPH model can be used for the prediction of chip thickness and shear angle for the corresponding material in future.