Cryogenic drill cooling

Effective drill cooling is essential in order to ensure adequate tool life in critical applications. This project will develop new experimental and computational techniques for coolant channel design in wet machining and provide new fundamental knowledge and understanding of the performance of cryogenic fluids for targeted drill cooling.

The student will spend periods at Sandvik in France or Italy during the project orientation. Key variables, objectives and constraints for wet machining applications will be identified and existing software tools used to carry out coolant channel optimisation studies.

A new laboratory-based cryogenic cooling apparatus will be designed and built and then used to carry out experiments to understand the effect of key cryogenic cooling parameters on cooling performance and wetting of a hot tool surface.  The CFD methods for two-phase flow developed for wet machining will be extended to cryogenic cooling, validated against experimental data, then used to explore design space and investigate the key variables such as cryogenic cooling variables. Following another industrial secondment to Sandvik, further optimisation studies on cryogenic cooling applications will then be carried out using Design of Experiments, surrogate modelling and stochastic optimisation methods. The experimental and computational data will then be used to develop software tools for Sandvik design engineers.