A study on thermal characteristics of micro-scale grinding process using nanofluid minimum quantity lubrication (MQL)

The objective of this study was to investigate the thermal characteristics of a micro-scale grinding process using nanofluid minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) with experimental and numerical analyses. In the experimental analysis, a series of micro-scale grinding experiments were conducted with the miniaturized machine tool system, and the sub-surface grinding temperatures and tangential grinding forces were measured with an embedded thermocouple and a load cell, respectively. For numerical analysis, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach was adopted to build a new thermal and flow model for the micro-scale grinding process with consideration of the input heat flux, while the grinding energy partition was also estimated using a response surface method (RSM). The grinding temperatures estimated from the numerical analysis displayed good agreement with experimental values, thus validating the proposed thermal model. The grinding temperatures, grinding heat flux into the workpiece and grinding energy partition under the nanofluid MQL were also found to be much lower than those in the cases of compressed air lubrication and pure MQL.