Vortex Tube Air Cooling: The Effect on Surface Roughness and Power Consumption in Dry Turning

Abstract

There has been increased awareness of the need to reduce environmental impacts in the last 10 years. The manufacturing industry is striving to reduce environmental impacts by introducing new materials with better characteristics, that consume less processing power and use smaller amounts of processing coolant. The main objective of this paper is to study the effect of the Ranque–Hilsch vortex cooling tube on power consumption and surface roughness quality in the turning process when machining mild steel material with a coated carbide cutting tool. The machining parameters involved in the experiment are cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut. The cutting speed is fixed at 160 m/min while the feed rate and the depth of cut are varied. The feed rates used are 0.10, 0.18 and 0.28 mm/rev, while the depth of cut is varied from 1.0 to 4.0 mm. During the machining process, the cutting temperatures are measured using an infrared thermometer and the power consumption is measured using a Prova 6830 power and harmonics analyzer. The surface roughnesses of the machined parts are measured using a surface roughness tester. The results show that cooling using Ranque–Hilsch vortex tube air cooling reduces the cutting temperature, but the power consumption and surface roughness are better under ambient conditions except at 0.28 mm/rev feed rate.