Influence of toolpath and clamping strategies on stainless steel plates distorsion after machining

Abstract

Heat exchangers in nuclear power generation plants are made of thin stainless-steel plates assembled together in order to improve their efficiency and compactness. To ensure the assembly, the global distortion of those plates must be mastered and minimized, mainly by predicting the evolution of the residual stress field during their manufacturing process chain. The residual stresses generated during rolling are removed by heat treatments process that also induce another stress field while cooling. During machining, those residual stresses are redistributed to reach another equilibrium state, leading to a macroscopic part distortion. The objective of this work is to study the influence of the machining toolpath and clamping strategies on the global part distortion so as to optimize the manufacturing process chain.