Experimental Study on Ultrasonic Vibration Assisted Drilling of Ti-6Al-4V at Different Amplitudes

In recent years, titanium alloys have been widely used in aerospace and other fields for their performance advantages. However, its high hardness and brittleness, in particular, low thermal conductivity and strong chemical affinity make titanium alloys become more difficult to process metal materials. Since the aerospace industry requires a large number of high-precision holes, the research on its processing technology has received much attention. According to investigations, the ultrasonic vibration-assisted drilling (UAD) technology is very suitable for drilling hard and brittle materials. In this paper, the variation of cutting force, cutting heat, roughness and hole expansion was investigated by control of processing parameters. Experiments show that cutting force, cutting heat, surface roughness and pore expansion decreased where amplitude is large. Specifically, an increase in spindle speed leads to decrease in cutting force and increase in cutting heat. The surface roughness of the hole generally increases with the increase of the spindle speed. But as the feed increases, the conventional drilling (CD) and the UAD show opposite behaviors. Hole’s surface roughness produced with CD becomes smaller, and UAD becomes larger.