Machinability Studies on Precipitation Hardened Stainless Steel using Cryo-Treated Textured Carbide Inserts

216-222Precipitation hardened stainless steel 17Cr-4Ni is martensitic steel posing high strength and excellent resistance against corrosion. Precipitation Hardened steel is considered as more difficult to machine materials and, consequently must be machined using different procedures. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is applied to analyze the machinability characteristics of 17-4 PH steel using textured cryo-treated tungsten carbide inserts. The characteristics such as main cutting force, vibration acceleration in three axes and surface roughness Ra were taken as responses in dry turning of PH steel. Mathematical models were developed and validated using ANOVA. The optimal parameters were identified using graphical and numerical methods and the interactive effect of input parameters were also studied using three-dimensional surface plots

Prediction of Equipment Effectiveness using Hybrid Moving Average-Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (MA-ANFIS) for decision support in Bus Body Building Industry

Abstract Managers are driven to accomplish significantly higher levels of operational performance due to the difficulty of today’s dynamic production environment. Typically, the precision of production facilities and the efficiency of manufacturing systems are significant variables in productivity. Thus, predicting machine performance has become an inevitable challenge for production managers. However, the question of how managers can reliably assess the effectiveness of equipments for resource allocation remains unaddressed properly. This issue has received little attention in previous research, but it is important in today’s manufacturing environment. This study introduces a hybrid moving average - adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (MA-ANFIS) to predict the possible effectiveness of equipment. Three real-world problems are considered when developing and evaluating three distinct equipment effectiveness prediction models. The evaluation confirms that the hybrid MA-ANFIS model based on Gaussian membership function outperforms other developed models. This comprehensive solution is packaged as a decision support system. This aids production managers in evaluating the equipment effectiveness, and effectively improving equipment’s performance to reduce time and cost of bus body building

Surface structural features and wear analysis of a multilayer Ti6Al4V-B4C thin film coated AISI 1040 steel

The deprived wear resistance of AISI 1040 steel often results in higher wear rates. The best ways to upgrade their wear resistance are to introduce hard particle reinforcement to produce a metal matrix composite which can be used as a coating. In the present study Ti-6Al-4V-4B _4 C metal matrix composite coatings were coated on AISI 1040 steel using the magnetron sputtering process and their dry sliding wear behavior was studied at room temperature. The coating morphology was explored by SEM, XRD, FT-IR, and AFM. The constant coating thicknesses of 80 nm and 115 nm were achieved for 0.5 h and 1 h coating duration, respectively. The effects of introducing B _4 C on the hardness, thermal behavior, wear, and friction characteristics were studied. The nano hardness and elastic modulus were attained by AFM nanoindentation technique which showed a maximum of 21.7 GPa and 218.4 GPa, respectively. It was proven that the adding of B _4 C increases the thermal stability of Ti-6Al-4V-4B _4 C coatings as well as modifies the oxidation mechanism. It is expected that the addition of B _4 C will improve the thermal behavior of thin film coatings for their practical application. Wear tests were executed by ball-on-disc wear tester with E-52100 sphere as the counterface at a sliding velocity of 2 m s ^−1 with 3 N load. Wear rate and coefficient of friction (CoF) reduced with an increase in load and sliding distances also composite coatings exhibited higher wear resistance within entire loading conditions, hereafter suggesting that it could be a favorable substitute to other hard coatings