Getting Technical - Best Chip Formation for Productivity and Economy in Machining
The perfect chips are the result of a critical balancing exercise. They must be not too long but long enough to avoid too short tool life of the cutting edges.Tell me the shape, colour, and dimensions of your chips; and I tell you the efficiency of your machining process.
The perfect chips are the result of a critical balancing exercise. They must be not too long but long enough to avoid too short tool life of the cutting edges. And they must not too short but short enough to avoid machine standstill time, right? Nobody ever promised that machining is an easy process, did they?
No other set of topics in machining have attracted greater interest than that of chip formation. Massive research has been done but it is difficult to apply the obtained scientific results into practical usable models. In this live event chip formation is discussed with the scientific results in the background but mainly from a practical perspective. Important is to control chip formation and evacuation as such that the cutting process itself is not disturbed, which would lead to machine standstill time, and that no damage is done to the machine tool, the cutting tool, the workpiece, and the machinist. Indeed, handling long hazardous chips can be an unsafe activity for the operators.
Short and long chips complement each other. Short chips are easily evacuated and do not disturb the process; hence the efficiency of the process is high. But short chips limit the tool life of the cutting edges and will endanger the machining economy. Long chips on the other hand will favour long tool life of the cutting edges and hence give a good machining economy. But long chips will – due to frequent stopping of the machine tool to remove the long chips – endanger the process efficiency. And of course, too long or too short chips can always be an issue for the quality of the machined surfaces.
The challenge for the machinist is to find that combination of cutting tool, cutting strategy, and cutting conditions that gives the best balance between short, but not to short chips and long, but not too long chips.
Inline Content - Survey
Current code - 5fce8e61489f3034e74adc64
