In the aerospace industry, burr removal is a very important part of the manufacturing process. Stacks of material on sections of an aircraft are assembled and drilled by hand. Due to extensive burr formation the sheets must be destacked so that burrs can be removed and then the stacks are reassembled and fastened together. If burrs are minimized in the drilling process, this would reduce the necessity for the sheets to be destacked and deburred.
One approach to minimizing burrs is to lower the thrust force in drilling through suitable modification of the drill geometry such as the use of a step drill. Although prior researchers have analyzed different drill geometries such as step drills and their effect on hole exit burr formation in the drilling process through experimentation, no work has been reported on modeling and analysis of step drilling forces and their relationship to burr formation as a function of the step drill geometry parameters. Consequently, this thesis focuses on the modeling of the thrust force and torque for step drills and analyzes their relationship with burr size as a function of the step drill geometry parameters. In the first step, a mechanistic model for thrust and torque in drilling is implemented for a standard twist drill. This mechanistic model is then adapted to predict the thrust and torque for a step drill. Subsequently, experiments are performed to validate the mechanistic model and to evaluate burr formation with standard and step drills. The influence of thrust and torque on hole exit burr formation is analyzed for different step drill geometries and experimental feeds and speeds. The results show that the predicted thrust and torque values for both drill geometries are in good agreement with measured values, although the torque model consistently underpredicts. For standard drill geometry in the calibration tests, the average error in the thrust prediction is 7.09% and the average error in the torque prediction is -18.05%. In validation tests, the average error for predicted thrust is 2.29% and the average error for predicted torque is -18.46%. For the step drill model the average error in thrust is 0.72% while the average error in torque is -8.72%. In addition, a reduction in the predicted thrust force for a step drill relative to the standard twist drill is found to correlate well with a reduction in the measured burr size. However, further reduction in the thrust force by varying the step angle and diameter ratio do not correlate well with the measured burr size. Likely reasons for these results are presented in this thesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/42884 |
| Date | 18 November 2011 |
| Creators | Flachs, Jennifer Rose |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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