Förstudie inför optimering : Av kapningsprocessen vid klingkapen

Sammanfattning: This thesis has been conducted at Ovako Bar for a period of 10 weeks and is the final part of the bachelor's programme in mechanical engineering. Ovako Bar is a business unit of the European steel concern Ovako which specializes in the manufacturing of engineering steel for applications in various fields of mechanical engineering. The company wants to improve profitability of their sawing centre by reducing the consumption of saw blades and increase productivity at one of their sawing machines. In the current situation the company uses disposable blades which are discarded either when a tool break occurs or when the quality requirements are no longer met for the outgoing material. A literature review was conducted in which various factors affecting the life span of the saw blades were analyzed after their impact on the outcome in which two factors was selected to be used for a design of experiments. The factors selected were feed per tooth and cutting speed in which a total of four experiments were conducted and finally the results showed that the interaction effect was the decisive factor for the outcome. To investigate the tool wear that had arisen a scanning electron microscope was used where a few teeth on each blade were studied for any damages. The conclusions that could be drawn from the experiment is that a high feed rate must be combined with a high cutting speed for best result which has to do with the fact that a higher feed requires a greater heat generation for the best chip formation. The same applies for the lower feed rate which must be combined with a lower cutting speed because a higher cutting speed causes a dominating wear on the clearance face.