The temperature knowledge is essential to understand and model the phenomena involved in metal cutting. A global measured value can only provide a clue of the heat generation during the process; however the deep understanding of the thermal aspects of cutting requires temperature field measurement. This paper focuses on infrared thermography applied to orthogonal cutting and enlightens an original experimental setup. A lot of information were directly measured or post-processed. These were mainly focused on the geometrical or thermo mechanical aspects of chip formation, i.e. tool-chip contact length, chip thickness, primary shear angle, heat flux generated in the shear or friction zones, and tool-chip interface temperature distribution. This paper proposes an experimental setup and post-processing techniques enabling to provide numerous, fundamental and original information about the metal cutting process. Some comparisons between collected data and previous experimental or theoretical results were made.

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