Subscale modeling of material flow in orthogonal metal cutting

Journal article, 2025

Enhanced simulation capability for the cutting process is crucial to making quick evaluations of cutting forces and temperatures, which are significant for assessing the machinability of the workpiece material and predicting tool wear. In this paper, the material flow in orthogonal cutting, including primary and secondary shear zones, is represented by a viscous/viscoplastic model that includes the temperature-sensitive Johnson-Cook flow stress model. A stabilized staggered finite element procedure is developed to handle incompressible Navier-Stokes material flow in combination with convection-dominated hardening and thermomechanical interaction. To handle material flow at tool-workpiece contact, a mixed method is used to reduce spurious oscillations in contact stresses along with simplified heat transfer in the tool-workpiece interface. A novel feature is that the velocity field is resolved as a subscale field to the velocity field of the distributed primary zone deformation model. It appears that the finite element solution to the subscale material flow model is significantly more cost-effective in contrast to directly addressing the velocity field and compared to the chip-forming simulations (DEFORM 2D). The cutting forces, temperature, and stress-strain state of the material in the critical deformation regions can be accurately estimated using the subscale model. The results obtained show that the trend of the estimated forces and temperatures is consistent with our experimental measurements, the DEFORM 2D simulations, and the experimental data from the literature.