Measurement and Analysis of Forces During High Speed Milling of EN-30B Alloy Steel

High speed machining (HSM) is one of the more useful and helpful technology. HSM is being adopted to increase the productivity, reducing manufacturing costs and for machining of hard materials. This research covers the steps taken to gain insight into the measurement and analysis of cutting forces during high speed milling so that these forces should have minimum effect on cutting tool and rapid tool wear can be controlled. In order to measure and record the cutting forces during high speed milling, a dynamometer is designed and developed. An accurate and reliable dynamometer is manufactured for measuring and recording the cutting force components. The calibration of the dynamometer is carried out and calibration factors for three axes and three force components are acquired. Based on these calibration factors three tests, cross-sensitivity, linearity, and performance tests were conducted. An alloy steel EN-30B is selected as work piece material. This material is high strength steel alloy and has good impact properties. A repeatable experimental setup and procedure is developed for measuring and recording the three components of cutting forces. A total of ten experiments are carried out and experimental setup is remained unchanged except for tool insert. The experiments involve same dry cutting cycle with face milling process. A sufficient set of experimental data is collected and three components of forces during high speed milling of EN-30B with coated carbide tool insert is measured, recorded and analyzed. Maximum high speeds of up to 500m/min are achieved during milling process. It is observed that the values of cutting forces increased with an increase in process parameters including, cutting speed, feed/ feed rate and depth of cut.