High Resolution Thermal Measurement for Advanced Manufacturing Research

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Approximately 30% of all metal product manufacturing activity in Canada is metal removal (machining) and, with few exceptions, everything extracted from the earth and processed into manufactured products across every sector of Canada's economy requires machining, either directly or indirectly. Machining is and will continue to be one of the most important cornerstones of manufacturing for the foreseeable future.******Our team at the McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute (MMRI), led by Dr. Stephen Veldhuis, have an extensive history in advanced manufacturing research with a specific focus in machining. By nature, machining research is highly applications based and has led to very strong partnerships between the MMRI and industry, ensuring MMRI research thrusts are working towards developing knowledge, techniques and technologies that lead to valuable solutions for industry.******In difficult to machine materials like titanium and Inconel, the millimetre sized “cutting zone” is subjected to local pressures exceeding 2 GPa and temperatures exceeding 1000ºC, resulting in severe chemical and physical wear phenomena. Addressing these demanding conditions requires the ability to characterize and understand the interactions occurring between the material and tool.******In the MMRI's field of metal cutting research, the majority of past work has been done on tools after they are worn out due to the extreme difficulty of in-situ characterization of machining processes. Drawing on over 20 years of experience in this field, the MMRI has been working on an experimental setup which makes in-situ characterization possible. The experimental setup has been proven and important data is now being collected using high-speed video to characterize the millimetre sized “cutting zone” on cutting tools in a way never done before.******To the best of our knowledge, the MMRI is the first research group in the world to characterize metal cutting in-situ in this way but we currently lack a robust method to measure temperatures in-situ. To be the first in the world to publish novel results in this direction, we are in critical need of a thermal imaging system which is the only feasible way to measure temperatures in our application.******In industry, the productivity, quality and cost of machining processes is greatly impacted by the performance of metal cutting tools. Wear and performance of these tools is governed by the temperatures and pressures in the cutting zone, leading to chemical and physical wear. Engineering tools to cut faster and last long requires a detailed understanding of the chemical and physical wear mechanisms, which are highly complex and still not fully understood due to the extreme difficulty of observing these mechanisms directly. A thermal imaging system will allow the MMRI's over 50 research personnel to greatly improve our ability in research experiments to measure temperature and better understand the fundamental drivers of physical and chemical wear.