Experimental Research on Pollution-Free Alcohol Cutting Fluid in Scratching of Single-Crystal Copper Material

Cutting fluid can improve the heat dissipation and lubrication in the cutting process and thus increase the machining quality. In this work, a pollution-free alcohol solution was proposed as the cutting fluid in an ultra-precision cutting process to explore green cutting fluids. The scratching experiments were conducted with the alcohol cutting fluid to study its effect on the cutting process. It is found that the use of an alcohol cutting fluid, on average, reduces the tangential and normal force about 27–53%, but exhibits few effects on the friction coefficient in the cutting process. Compared to dry cutting, the alcohol cutting fluid reduces the exposed shear slip steps on the outside surface of the chip, which implies the decreased chip deformation degree of workpiece material in the cutting process. The alcohol cutting fluid can reduce microburrs and decrease the machined surface roughness Ra from 21 nm to 9.9 nm in the ultra-precision turning application on single-crystal copper material.