Experimental study on the low-feed grooving process with different grooving tools

The requirement of grooved surface and grooving forces is improved for the machining of precision and small parts in the modern industry. Reducing the grooving feed rate is an effective method to improve the surface quality and lower the cutting forces. But small feed rate results in the problems of chip breaking and cutting vibration. Improvement of tool geometry is the solution to the problems, however, The matching relationship between the tool geometry and the feed rate is not clear. In this paper, three grooving tools (N123G5-0300-0002-CM, GZD3002-MC, and N123G5-0300-0001-CF respectively) with different parameters have been selected and a series of grooving experiments have been performed. The experimental results show that the initial state and the steady state will produce two different kinds of chips during the grooving process. For CF tools, chip breaking occurs when the feed rate is higher than 0.04 mm/rev, and the feed rate should be higher than 0.06 mm/rev for the other two tools. An analytical model for calculating surface roughness considering the tool geometry parameters and feed rate has been proposed. The elastic recovery of the grooved surface has been analyzed to explain the error between analytical results and experimental results.