Process mechanisms and their relevance for sustainable machining processes

The optimization of electrical energy demand is an important objective function in machining science. This ensue minimum cost and specific energy demand of manufacturing processes. Mechanical machining as one of the major manufacturing processes consumed on average 38 TWh of electrical energy. This generated on average 16 million tones of CO2 emitted to the environment in the UK in 2012. Since carbon dioxide emission is attributable to electrical energy consumption, urgent action is required at all levels of machining processes in order to curtail the impact of electrical energy consumption on the environment through the optimization of process mechanisms. In this work, the specific cutting energy and process mechanisms were correlated in order to determine the efficiency of machining processes and to evaluate the specific energy optimization criterion for sustainable machining. The results show that for minimum energy demand and sustainable process mechanism, it is important that the ratio of the undeformed chip thickness to the cutting edge radius be equal or greater than 1. This ratio encourages shearing dominated mechanism and eliminates ploughing and rubbing at the tool-workpiece interface. This work could aid energy management for resource efficiency and sustainable manufacture of products at the production and process planning stages.