Study on Reduction of Machining Time in CNC Turning Centre by Genetic Algorithm

Machining optimization has an inevitable role in contemporary operation of CNC and non-conventional machining processes. As there is a financial restraint involved in all the machines, the effective operation of these machines take a center stage to get required payback. The machining variables are detrimental for the incurred cost due to machining which in turn necessitates finding optimum values before a part is put into production. The operating parameters in this context are cutting speed, feed rate, depth of cut etc. that do not violate any of the constraints that may apply on the process and satisfy the objective function such as minimizing the total production time or production cost or maximizing the production rate or combination of several objective functions. Turning is one of the important operations in industries. The turning centres are so versatile that they find wide applications in all the manufacturing industries. Hence it is desired to optimize the operating parameters of the turning process. In this work a component is considered with turning, facing and undercutting. The objective function is to minimize the machining time with constraints such as cutting power, cutting force, tool life, surface finish of the product and the range of the operating parameters. For solving the above problems optimization procedure was developed using Genetic Algorithm. The optimization problem was solved very efficiently using the above procedure. The result is comparable with the current practice.