Holistic performance analysis during sustainable machining of Inconel 718 with minimum quantity lubrication-based nanofluids

Recently, more efforts have been devoted to satisfying the sustainability requirements in machining processes. Besides, implementing holistic performance analysis that integrates the environmental impact, sustainable machining elements, and quality of the machined product becomes more needed. In this research work, the implementation of a new holistic performance analysis approach was presented to evaluate the machining process of Inconel 718 with minimum quantity lubrication (MQL)-based nano-cutting fluids (NCFs). The conducted machining experimental results and different life cycle stages of MQL-NCFs machining strategies using two different nano-additives (i.e., multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Al₂O₃ particles) were presented and assessed in this study. The life cycle assessment (LCA) according to the defined system boundary of both strategies was conducted as a first step of the performance analysis. Afterward, five performance metrics were selected to assess both studied strategies. Modeling and multi-objective optimization were performed to obtain the optimized cutting conditions for both strategies. Furthermore, these optimized cutting conditions were then processed through the non-dominated sorting to obtain the superiority of each strategy. It was found that MQL-Al₂O₃-NCF shows better performance for the machining cost, while MQL-MWCNTs-NCF shows better performance for other studied performance analysis metrics.