Investigation of formation mechanisms of chips in orthogonal cutting process

This work investigates the formation mechanisms of chips in orthogonal cutting of mild steel and the transformation conditions between various morphology chips. It is supposed that the modeling material follows the Johnson-Cook constitutive model. In orthogonal cutting process, both the plastic flow and the instability behaviors of chip materials are caused by the plane strain loadings. Therefore, the general instability behaviors of materials in plane strain state are first analyzed with linear perturbation method and a universal instability criterion is established. Based on the analytical results, the formation mechanisms of chips and the transformation conditions between continuous and serrated chips are further studied by instability phase diagram method. The results show that the chip formation strongly depends on the intensity ratios between shear and normal stresses. The ratios of dissipative rates of plastic work done by compression and shear stresses govern the transformation from continuous to serrated chips. These results are verified by the numerical simulations on the orthogonal cutting process. © Owned by the authors, 2012.