Micromilling operation of AISI 52100: experimental and numerical analysis

In many industrial field the part miniaturization is a very important task for increasing the competitiveness in the market. For this reason industries and researchers focused their attention on the micro manufacturing processes. A wide range of different processes can be utilized for manufacturing micro components and micro products. Amongst them the micro cutting processes (i.e., micromilling, microturning and microdrilling) play an important role because of their high flexibility and ability in realizing complex shapes. Of course, it is very important to analyze advantages and limits of these manufacturing processes since these processes base the material transformation on different physical-chemical phenomena. Therefore, the comprehension of metallurgical aspects (phases, grain structure, etc.) influence on machinability of the micro cutting processes is fundamental. In this context, the present paper reports the preliminary part of a research aimed at developing a robust FE model to correctly simulate micromilling of hardened AISI 52100 steel samples with different metallurgical state and, consequently, initial hardness machined under different cutting conditions. The experimental data, coming from this preliminary experimental campaign, will be used for calibrating and validating an FE simulation strategy and a material model able to take into account the different material microstructures in order to increase the accuracy of the FE results.