High speed machining (HSM) is an advanced production technology with great future potential. Chip serration or segmentation is a commonly observed phenomenon during high speed machining of metals, which is found to be ascribed to a repeated shear band formation fueled by thermo-plastic instability occurring within the primary shear zone. The occurrence of serrated chips leads to the cutting force fluctuation, decreased tool life, degradation of the surface finish and less accuracy in machine parts during high speed machining. Hence, understanding and controlling serrated chip formation in HSM are extremely important. In this work, a novel dynamic large strain extrusion machining (DLSEM) technique is developed for suppressing formation of serrated chips. The systematic DLSEM experiments of Ti-6Al-4V and Inconel 718 alloy with varying degrees of imposed extrusion constraint were carried out. It is found that there is a prominent chip morphology transition from serrated to continuous state and shear band spacing decreases with the constraint degree increasing. In order to uncover underlying mechanism of the imposed extrusion constraint suppressing repeated adiabatic shear banding in DLSEM, new theoretical models are developed where the effects of extrusion constraint, material convection due to chip flow and momentum diffusion during shear band propagation are included. The analytical expressions for the onset criterion of adiabatic shear band and shear band spacing in DLSEM are obtained. The theoretical predictions are in agreement with the experimental results. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
