Exploring the Potential of Animal Fats and Vegetable Oils as Potential Metal Cutting Fluids

Conventional mineral based oils currently being used as metal cutting fluids are not environmentally friendly and pose health challenges to users. Therefore, there is need to formulate alternate cutting fluids that will not pose such challenges. Hence, this study was aimed at formulating and characterizing some selected vegetable and animal oilsas metal cutting fluids, for possible replacement of mineral based cutting fluids. The vegetable and animal oils were formulated into cutting fluids following procedures from published articles. Thereafter, the formulated fluids were characterized in terms of pH, viscosity, fluidity, density and corrosiveness. Conventional mineral oil-based cutting fluid (MCF) was used as control in the study. The properties of the formulated fluids such as pH had an average value of 9, which is the standard value for most mineral based cutting fluids. Also, corrosion studies of the fluids showed that they cannot accelerate corrosion in machined components. This was evident from the results of the corrosive tests carried out, with corrosion rates ranging from 0.00040 mm/yrto0.00082 mm/yr for all the sample fluids. The results for density of all the sample fluids was between 0.9110 g/cm3 to 0.9130 g/cm3, while that of viscosity at 100OC was between 7.32 cSt to 9.40 cSt. The results showed that the pH, density, viscosity and fluidity of the sample fluids recorded competitive values with that of the control fluid. The best sample fluid with respect to all the properties obtained and compared with the control fluid (MCF) was LCF. This was followed by GCF, TCF, PKCF and POCF respectively. Hence, based on the characterization parameters studied, it was deduced that the sample fluid; having shared closed values with the conventional or control fluids, can be employed in cutting fluid formulation