High speed machining of aluminium gear box without temperature stabilization

At the present time both clutch and mechanism housings, which are the main components from automotive gear boxes, are made of special aluminium alloys. These alloys are extremely light when compared with steel, making them a perfect choice to mitigate the cars weight and machining costs. Nonetheless they possess a high thermal expansion coefficient, which can be considered a major disadvantage since it makes necessary to pay extraordinary attention to dimensional variations during the production cycle due to temperature deviations. High speed machining of precision components made of aluminium requests thus their temperature to become previously stable. This procedure is the only way to force dimensions to stay inside its tolerance intervals. The main purpose of the present work was to assess the possibility to avoid the use of special ovens to make the clutch housing temperature become stable prior to machining. The dimensional stabilization of 40 sample parts, pre-heated at three temperature levels, was accomplished through the use of this system. The achieved results were made possible by analysing the part’s temperature at the machine’s entrance, the machine’s interior temperature, 35 measured dimensions and their tolerance intervals as well as the average temperature deviations of each of the five considered batches. By analysing the obtained results in detail it was possible to determine which dimensions show high sensitiveness to temperature (high correlation between dimension’s variation and temperature). Among these dimensions we can point out the ones related with depth, since they display the highest deviations due to temperature. Being a work with practical application it was possible to confirm the benefit of using this methodology by achieving significant enhancements on production efficiency, energy savings and reduction on maintenance costs, through the application of small adjustments to the machining sequence and by adopting a systematic tuning of certain dimensions.