Experimental Investigation on the Compatibility of Nanoparticles with Vegetable Oils for Nanofluid Minimum Quantity Lubrication Machining

Several health and environmental related issues caused by the application of traditional cutting fluids in machining can be solved by implementing eco-friendly technologies such as minimum quantity lubrication (MQL). Moreover, nanofluid MQL has been proposed to enhance the cooling/lubricating properties of pure MQL and displays significantly good results for machinability. However, the mechanism on compatibility of nanoparticles with cutting fluids has not been explored. In this study, nanoparticles with different hardness and vegetable oils with different viscosity were selected for nanofluids preparation. The end milling experiments were carried out on 7050 material by applying MQL with particularly prepared nanofluids. The cutting force and surface roughness were measured corresponding to the machining performance. The compatibility of hardness of nanoparticles with viscosity of base fluids has been evaluated, and the mechanism has been analyzed by new-designed tribology tests. Results show that canola oil-based diamond nanofluids MQL exhibit the lowest cutting force and natural77 oil-based diamond nanofluids perform the lowest surface roughness with reduction of 10.71 and 14.92%, respectively, compared to dry machining condition. The research is novel and contributes to the machining of such materials at the industry level.