Chatter Mitigation in Turning Slender Components Using Viscous Fluids

This paper investigates the performance of a novel viscous passive damping solution to mitigate the chatter vibrations issue in the context of turning thin-walled cylindrical shell components for aerospace and other industries. This study involves the use of two different viscous fluids, motor oil and silicone oil, which have viscosities of 102 cSt and 350 cSt, respectively, to fill the in-house developed tube components with the aim of improving machining performance. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) graphs were studied for chatter analysis, and surface roughness parameters such as average surface roughness (Ra) and mean roughness depth (Rz) were considered for studying the effectiveness of the viscous damping fluids. The results obtained with viscous damping were then compared with an undamped/unfilled tube with the same geometry. The cutting experiments showed that the motor oil reduced the excessive vibrations while silicone oil was able to eliminate them. For the tube with motor oil, the magnitude of the process sound at chatter frequency was reduced by 6.6 times as compared to an unfilled tube, whereas for the tube with silicone oil, the amplitude at chatter frequency was reduced by 14.8 times. Moreover, the surface quality of the tubes with motor oil and silicone oil shows almost equal improvement, indicating the need for future research on the type and amount of viscous fluids for implementing the concept in real cases.