A bench scale tribometer, developed at the McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute (MMRI) was designed for mimicking the friction and wear conditions on the rake face of a metal cutting tool. It provides insight into the performance of cutting tools operating under high stress and high temperature machining conditions. It saves test material costs, reduces machine downtime for testing, increases the number of test replicates and effectively adds a reliable testing tool to characterize metal cutting operations.

A detailed investigation into the stress distribution, temperature profile and indentation pattern has been performed in order to verify the ability of the device to capture the machining environment and to gain a better understanding of the friction effects and wear conditions. The investigation used finite element analysis to simulate the MMRI’s tribometer with the FEA results compared to the experimental results. This data was then used to tune the operating conditions of the tribometer to improve its ability to simulate the machining environment.