Estimation of heat flux imposed on the rake face of a cutting tool: A nonlinear, complex geometry inverse heat conduction case study

In this paper the sequential function specification method is used to estimate the transient heat flux imposed on the rake face of a cutting tool during the cutting operation with two different assumptions. In one of them the thermal conductivity is taken to be constant, and in the other one it varies with temperature. The cutting tool is modeled as a three dimensional object. The capabilities of the geometric modeling, mesh generation as well as solver of the commercial software ANSYS are utilized in order to reduce the time expended for modeling and direct heat conduction solution, in both linear and nonlinear problems. This way the inverse heat conduction algorithm employs ANSYS as a subprogram through the ANSYS Parametric Design Language (APDL). The stability as well as accuracy is compared for cases of linear and nonlinear heat conductions. The effect of nonlinearity, as well as different sensor locations is investigated in order to arrive at an optimal experimental procedure. Finally, a typical temperature data during the working condition are used to recover the heat flux at the cutting tool surface using linear as well as nonlinear solutions.