Experimental Investigation of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (SCCO2) Performance as a Sustainable Cooling Technique

The use of mineral based cutting fluid in machining process induces negative effects especially to the environment, operator's health and the machining cost itself. In sustainable machining concept, the coolant techniques such as minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) and cryogenic coolant have shown promising performances especially in terms of cutting temperature and cutting force. Nowadays, the supercritical carbon dioxide has a potential to replace the mineral based cutting fluid. In this paper, the experiment were carried out using orthogonal cutting process in which the efficiency of SCCO 2 technique was compared to MQL technique with respect to cutting temperature, cutting force, chip thickness and tool-chip contact length. The experimental results showed that the application of SCCO 2 as the cutting fluid was more efficient for the machining process as it reduced the cutting temperature, cutting force, chip thickness, tool-chip contact length and specific energy compared to MQL machining technique.