Investigation on the effect of cooling of the tool using heat pipe during hard turning with minimal fluid application

Hard turning with minimal fluid application is a recently developed technique to alleviate the problem associated with cutting fluid. During this process, very small quantity of cutting fluid is applied as a narrow high velocity pulsing jet at the cutting zone. As the quantity of cutting fluid is very small, some auxiliary cooling of tool using heat pipe was attempted in the present work to enhance heat dissipation and thus improving cutting performance. Heat pipe was installed in vertical position in contact with the tool for extracting more heat from the tool. The influence of heat pipe cooling of tool on the cutting performance was analyzed by Taguchi's design of experiments. It was observed that the use of heat pipe in minimal fluid application reduced cutting temperature and tool wear to a maximum of 22% and 15%, respectively, in comparison with conventional hard turning with minimal fluid application without the aid of heat pipe. It appears that heat pipe can be successively employed as a mean of cooling the tool during hard turning with minimal fluid application.