Effects of Dislocation Density Evolution on Mechanical Behavior of OFHC Copper during High-Speed Machining

This paper aims at investigating the change in material behavior induced by microstructure evolution during high-speed machining processes. Recently, high-speed machining has attracted quite a lot of interest from researchers due to its high efficiency and surface quality in machining large-scale components. However, the material behavior could change significantly at high-cutting speeds compared to the conventional cutting conditions, including their microstructure and t mechanical response. This is due to the basic physics of material at microscopic levels with high strain, high strain rates, and high temperatures. In this study, the dislocation density-related microstructure evolution process and mechanical behavior of OFHC (Oxygen-free high-conductivity) copper in high-speed machining with speeds ranging from 750 m/min to 3000 m/min are investigated. SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) and advanced EBSD (Electron Backscattered Diffraction) techniques are used to obtain high-quality images of the microstructures and analyze the dislocation density and grain size evolution with different cutting speeds. Moreover, as material plasticity is induced by the motion of dislocations at micro-scales, a dislocation-density based (DDB) model is applied to predict strain-stress and microstructure information during the cutting process. The distributions of dislocation densities, both statistically stored dislocations (SSDs) and geometrically necessary dislocations (GNDs), are obtained through simulation and experimentation, respectively. The results show that the fluctuation in the cutting forces at high cutting speeds is induced by the specific evolution and distribution of the dislocation density under high strain-rates, and the periodical distribution of sub-surface and fracture behavior during chip separation, which are also found to be influenced by the evolution of the dislocation density.