Measurement and Modelling of Cutting Temperature in the Rock-Cutting Process

Rock-cutting processes are the backbone of the mining, oil and gas, civil engineering, and construction industries. Performance of such cutting operations is controlled by temperature-dependent phenomena of abrasion, phase transformations, and oxidation of tooling. This study develops a novel approach for the measurement of cutting temperature for the case of the rock cutting process in longitudinal turning of granite with a polycrystalline diamond dome cutter. A specially designed setup was built for machining granite with a constant depth of cut. A special toolholder instrumented with embedded temperature sensors was used for temperature measurement in locations away from the cutting point. Inverse heat conduction problem-solving procedures were developed to reconstruct the cutting temperature based on the FEM thermal model of the cutting device, a multi-objective optimization workflow, and the experiment results. Cutting experiments carried out at the cutting speed of v c = 120-160 m/min resulted in dome cutter temperatures of 500-700 °C, approaching the temperature level of diamond wear and/or graphitization.