ABSTRACT The metal cutting is one of the most basic and common operations in manufacturing industries. The quality of final product depends largely upon the control of metal cutting operations performed on its components. There are many characteristics of the machined components which directly contribute to the product quality. These characteristics may include dimensional accuracy, surface finish, roundness, etc. Most of the characteristics of a work-piece are the function of machine-tool and cutting-tool condition, cutting parameters, material of the tool and work-piece, and worker training. The production planners generally don't have control over the material of the work-piece and condition of machine-tool. The worker training problems are addressed separately based upon the availability, time, learning curve issues, etc. However, the cutting parameters are totally controlled by the production planner. Therefore, the selection of the cutting parameters becomes a critical issue to control the quality. The selection of the cutting parameters is mainly dependent on the economics of metal cutting operations. However, traditionally these economic models do not include the quality related cost. Even though, some recent attempts have been made to include quality issues in the tool economics models cutting parameters but the relationship between the surface roughness and cutting parameters has not been explored extensively. This paper is an attempt to develop a model to include surface roughness into the tool-economics model to select cutting parameters using Taguchi's loss function approach.
