Dry cutting study of an aluminium alloy (A2024-T351): a numerical and experimental approach

In the present contribution, experimental and numerical methodologies concerning orthogonal cutting are proposed in order to study the dry cutting of an aeronautic aluminium alloy (A2024-T351). The global aim concerns the comprehension of physical phenomena accompanying chip formation with respect to cutting speed, such as chip segmentation and fragmentation. For experimental validation, series of tests are carried out concerning geometrical analysis of the chip; video sequences of chip formation with a high-speed camera, and high-frequency sampling measurements of the cutting force signal are realised. For the numerical approach, the material and its ductile shear failure behaviour are based on the Johnson-Cook laws. The material failure model exploited considers both damage evolution and energy coupling. Numerical results concerning cutting force and segmentation frequency are compared to experimental ones. Moreover, an analysis of damage distributions is presented.