Dry machining of stainless steel (316L) using coated carbide inserts

Austenitic stainless steel (316L) is one of the most important engineering materials with wide variety of applications because of its properties such as high hardness, toughness, yield strength, excellent ductility, and superior resistance to corrosion and oxidation. However, their machinability is more difficult as compared to other alloy steels due to low thermal conductivity, high built-up edge (BUE) formation tendency and high deformation hardening. The problems of poor surface finish and high tool wear are common while machining these materials. The objective of this dissertation is to study the performance of coated carbide inserts and to find out the optimum parameters while dry machining. The design of experiment was done using design expert, where cutting speed, feed rate, depth of cut and nose radius were taken as input parameters. The output responses were the cutting force, surface roughness and tool wear.