An Experimental Study of Drilling of Hard-to-Cut Grade 5 Titanium Alloy using Cobalt Drill Bits

Titanium is found to be one of the hardest elements and hence machining of Titanium has always been considered as a challenge in the manufacturing field. Out of all machining process, drilling is considered to be difficult and has to be done with much care and perfection because undercut or overcut holes may result in the failure of the particular part or assembly. Hence, it is very important to study more about drilling parameters on hardest metal like Titanium as the drilling of titanium is a tedious task than other machining operations. In this present work, drilling was done on a Ti6Al-4V plate with cobalt drills of different diameters of 6 mm, 8 mm and 10 mm. A study is done on the Force (Ft ), Torque (Mt ) and Temperature (T) is carried out. The drill bits are analyzed before and after drilling using Scanning Electron Microscope to compare the wear pattern of the drill bits.