A Thermomechanically Motivated Approach for Identification of Flow Stress Properties in Metal Cutting

The paper presents a novel thermomechanically coupled distributed primary deformation zone model to assist the inverse identification of Johnson-Cook material parameters to be used for machining simulations. A special feature of the enhanced model is that the assumed stress field is temperature-dependent, where the thermomechanical coupling governs the stress and temperature distributions across the primary shear zone to describe the thermal softening effect. By using stress, strain, strain rate, and temperature distributions from the thermomechanically enhanced model, Johnson-Cook material parameters are calibrated for orthogonal cutting tests of C38, 42CrMo4, and AA6082 materials where continuous chip formation prevails. The performance of the parameters is compared with that of a wider set of cutting tests using finite element simulations. The results show that the thermomechanically motivated model yields closer results to experiments in terms of cutting force and chip thickness (9% and 34% difference, respectively) compared with the original thermally uncoupled model (47% and 92% difference, respectively). Identification of the material parameters by this method focuses directly on the orthogonal cutting test and it does not require many experiments or simulations. In fact, the proposed methodology is computationally robust and cost-efficient which makes it preferable compared with other methods which are more accurate but highly time-consuming.