Abstract
Many efforts have been made over the years to minimize the usage of mineral oil-based MWFs. This includes the trail of its alternatives, such as vegetable oil-based MWFs, nanofluids, etc. These alternatives have shown comparable results to mineral oil-based MWFs in producing a better surface finish and machining efficiency. Apart from the conventional flooding of MWFs, several alternative techniques have been developed by researchers to minimize or eliminate the usage of MWFs, including dry machining, high pressure coolant technique, minimum quantity lubrication, etc. which have also demonstrated promising results. This review attempts to highlight the drawbacks of mineral oil-based MWFs and to assess the applicability of vegetable oil-based MWFs in machining applications. Furthermore, other sustainable machining techniques are discussed in the literature review section, which highlight the main issues associated with the mentioned machining operations and their shortcomings based on the most recent literature. From the comprehensive and critical review that was performed, we inferred that the alternative methods are not mature enough at this stage and that they fall behind in some associated outcomes, some of which may be the tribological properties, surface finish or surface roughness, the cutting forces, the amount of working fluid consumed, etc. More efforts are still needed to fully eliminate the use of MWFs. Moreover, the applications of nanofluids in machining operations have been reviewed in this paper. We concluded from the critical review that nanofluids are an emerging technology which have found their place in machining applications due to their excellent thermophysical properties, but are still in their developmental stage, and more detailed studies are needed to make these a cost-effective solution.