Tribological characterization of the cooling performance when applying cryogenic coolants and minimum quantity lubrication

Cryogenic minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) offers the potential to combine high cooling capacities, advantageous lubrication effects and a significant reduction regarding resource consumption. However, due to the wide range of machining applications and different load cases, an efficient design of the respective supply strategy is comparatively difficult. In this study, a tribological approach is presented that enables a characterization of the cooling and lubrication properties in dependence of the supply strategy and two representative load cases. The results show that the tribological setup is well suited to evaluate the occurring thermomechanical loads in dependence of the cryogenic MQL strategies applied.