Surface Integrity of Turned 6061 Aluminum Alloy using Liquid Nitrogen as Cooling Medium

Aluminum alloy is widely used in automobile, aerospace and other fields due to its excellent strength-to-weight ratio. And machined surface integrity is an important factor affecting the service performance of parts. In this paper, surface integrity of turned 6061 aluminum under liquid nitrogen cooling condition was studied. The results shows that, cryogenic cooling cutting with liquid nitrogen could effectively reduce the surface roughness, inhibit the generation of residual tensile stress and improved the surface microhardness compared with dry and emulsion cooling cutting. Cryogenic cooling processing has great advantages in cutting machining.