A Continuing Study in the Determination of Temperatures in Metal Cutting Using Remote Thermocouples

Abstract

The results of research are presented whose objective was to develop a remote thermocouple technique for measuring cutting temperatures in a turning operation. The measuring scheme relies on the signals from two standard thermocouples located beneath the cutting tool insert. These signals are fed into an analog computer which calculates on-line the temperature at the tool point. The on-line computation provides an estimate of the tool point temperature within about one second rather than requiring the tool thermal system to come to steady state before temperatures are estimated. The research included two development phases. The first involved the use of digital computer simulations of the heat transfer process in a generalized cutting tool. This led to the derivation of a simple equation to estimate the cutting temperature from measurements taken at two remote points. The second phase concerned experimental validation of the computer simulations under a variety of cutting conditions.