The upcoming green revolution will impact machining at the heart of the UKs precision manufacturing industry: supplying sectors including energy, automotive, and aerospace. The peculiarity of the UK's manufacturing industry is it that it is formed by a large number of long standing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Legacy equipment, on which UK machining SMEs rely uses costly, environmentally damaging, and machine degrading flood coolant, or dry machining which lacks the cooling and material removal properties of the former. The UK is at risk of losing its competitive edge in manufacturing capability, alongside the extensive supply chain that underpins it.

Kugel Rotary (machining), Quaker Houghton (lubricants), the University of Sheffield's Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, the University of Brighton's Advanced Engineering Centre, and Bloc Digital (Industry 4.0) will develop a cost-effective Ultrasonic Minimum Quantity Lubrication (UltraMQL) machining system to retrofit to existing equipment. This will enable SMEs to take advantage of previously unaffordable technologies, and upgrade them for incoming regulations under the green revolution and Net Zero targets.

Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) can significantly reduce a company's energy footprint and running costs, as well as reduce the amount of coolant use by up to 99%. However, achieving a reliable delivery of oil in MQL systems is challenging: oil viscosity varies significantly depending on the supplier, the local temperature, and ageing of the oil. Current state-of-the-art MQL systems use a Venturi tube to aerosolize the lubricant. This approach is simple and robust as it is fully passive, but it is strongly dependent on oil's viscosity changes and has an erratic flow rate, which can lead to poor surface finish or excessive contamination of the machined material. A true multi-oil, cost-effective, high-precision flow rate unit is not currently on the market.

The UltraMQL team have the necessary experience and skills to develop a hybrid stream-generator/ultrasonic-transducer aerosoliser that would respond and adapt to viscosity changes, and provide real-time monitoring of the lubrication process. We will also develop and integrate a remote monitoring solution, using acoustic and video monitoring, to provide workshops with a fully integrated retrofit approach to sustainable high-tech manufacturing. By project end the team will have produced a validated prototype of the complete integrated system and lean concept designs to clearly demonstrate value to the customer.