Over the past few decades, the demand for employing sustainable machining has increased because of high competition, and operator health, and environmental concerns. The generated heat is an immense challenge when machining difficult-to-cut materials such as Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI) and Ti-6Al-4V alloy due to their poor thermal conductivity. The amount of heat generated significantly affects their machinability. Application sustainable cooling strategy instead of conventional flood for these materials has become more desirable, so Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) has been proposed. However, MQL has inefficient cooling ability. To enhance the cooling and lubricating efficiency of an MQL, nanoparticles can be dispersed into a base fluid, thereby creating an MQL-nanofluid.

This work attempts to improve the MQL machining performance by adding aluminum oxide (Al2O3) nanoparticles which have superior tribological and thermal properties. Furthermore, to the best of the author’s knowledge, there is a gap in the available literature regarding the numerical modelling of the ADI machining process including the effect of coolant. ADI constitutive equation was coded into ABAQUS software package and used for heat generation computations at the workpiece-tool interface. The results were used in a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model to evaluate the heat removal ability of MQL in the cutting zone. In this research, the Ti-6Al-4V alloy and ADI were machined at different cutting parameters with different coolant approaches to optimize the combination of cutting parameters and sustainable coolant methods. The findings showed that adding Al2O3 nanoparticles enhanced the convection, wettability, and conduction characteristics of the proposed sustainable MQL-nanofluid technique, and offered a significant improvement in tool wear behavior, power consumption, and surface roughness in compared to regular MQL. The results of the CFD model for applying the MQL approach during the machining of ADI were found to be in acceptable agreement with the experimental results.

This research determines an appropriate sustainable cooling technique to improve the machinability of ADI and Ti-6Al-4V while considering both the operator's health and the environmental impacts. This work codes the constitutive equation for ADI and develops both an effective FEM model and CFD simulation for the machining of ADI using MQL cooling.