Studies on Machining Characteristics and Microbiological Growth over Stir Casted A356-Graphite Metal Matrix Composites (A Comparison between Pure Metals and Composite)

The need of Metal Matrix Composites (MMCs) are increasing day by day due to their good properties like light weight, high strength, durability, corrosion resistance etc. In the present work A356 is taken as main base material due to its excellent mechanical properties and graphite as fortifying material because of high conductive property to form MMC. Machining is done with and without cutting oil by using automatic feed lathe machine by varying the speed and depth of cuts to find out the cutting forces, cutting tool temperatures and surface roughness and found that these values are gradually increased in many cases. Also done microbiological check and found that the colony count is gradually increased from fresh oil usage to used cutting oil after machining. These tests also done on MMCs, pure brass and pure aluminum and compared the results with MMCs. Novelty focused in present research work is regarding Microbial Organism Growth and its pattern over a period of time since these organism are cancerogenic for the operator and in health and hygiene point of view, lot of research work is going on over this organism growth on combination of several cutting fluids and materials. With the evolvement of composite materials, effect of cutting fluids on the above phenomenon is focused in present work. As a routine work, effect of cutting forces also established by changing machining parameters and presented.