DETERMINATION THE OPTIMAL CUTTING CONDITIONS AFFECTING THE SURFACE ROUGHNESS USING TAGUCHI METHOD IN TURNING (AL-12%SI) BY CARBIDE TOOL

Abstract

Surface Roughness (SR) is considered one of the most important indications to specify the quality of machined parts. There are many machining parameters having a large effect on it. The objective of the present study is to find the optimum conditions in turning of Al-12%Si alloy to get lowest surface roughness by applying the Taguchi method. The basic parameters which were taken into consideration in this work are: cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut in order. Experiments have been conducted by using L9 orthogonal array with three levels for each parameter. The nine test specimens were machined in terms of their levels, and average of SR (Ra) values were measured by means of surface roughness tester SRT 6210 device. The optimum combination of process parameters has been found through analysis of main effects for Ra and Signal-to-Noise S/N ratio, and the significant parameter was identified depending on ANOVA analyses. In the present work, the results show that the significant factor is depth of cut followed by feed rate and cutting speed, and the obtained results from the experiments are acceptable for the ranges of cutting conditions that have been selected in this case study. The predicted values and measured values are fairly close, which indicates that the Taguchi method can be effectively used to predict the surface roughness