Computational and Experimental Inverse Problem Approach for Determination of Time Dependency of Heat Flux in Metal Cutting

This study develops the method for solution of inverse heat conduction problem applied to metal cutting. The proposed method operates with a selection procedure involving iterative solutions of heat forward problem. In such formulation, it allows avoiding difficulties associated with ill-posed inverse problems inherent to conventional formulations. Inverse heat problem was transformed into constrained optimization problem via objective function which metrizes the difference between FE and experimental data. Specially designed solid HSS cutting tool with embedded thermocouples was manufactured. The method was validated for the case of orthogonal machining of 6061 aluminum alloy. The numerical simulations were performed with the help of COMSOL Multiphysics and MATLAB scripts. Heat flux exhibits descending trend over the time of the cutting test and closely follows hyperbola function behavior with the average value of q = 4.6 MW/m².