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Annealed metals are surprisingly difficult to cut, involving high forces and an unusually thick "chip." This anomaly has long been explained, based on ex situ observations, using a model of smooth plastic flow with uniform shear to describe material removal by chip formation. Here we show that this phenomenon is actually the result of a fundamentally different collective deformation mode-sinuous flow. Using in situ imaging, we find that chip formation occurs via large-amplitude folding, triggered by surface undulations of a characteristic size. The resulting fold patterns resemble those observed in geophysics and complex fluids. Our observations establish sinuous flow as another mesoscopic deformation mode, alongside mechanisms such as kinking and shear banding. Additionally, by suppressing the triggering surface undulations, sinuous flow can be eliminated, resulting in a drastic reduction of cutting forces. We demonstrate this suppression quite simply by the application of common marking ink on the free surface of the workpiece material before the cutting. Alternatively, prehardening a thin surface layer of the workpiece material shows similar results. Besides obvious implications to industrial machining and surface generation processes, our results also help unify a number of disparate observations in the cutting of metals, including the so-called Rehbinder effect.folding | plasticity | metal cutting | instability | deformation

Measurement of strain field in the primary deformation zone is of major interest for development of machining as an experimental technique for studying phenomena associated with large strain deformation. A study has been made of the primary deformation zone and tool-chip interface in planestrain (two-dimensional) machining of metals. The use of a high-speed, charge-coupled device (CCD) imaging system in conjunction with an optically transparent, sapphire cutting tool has enabled characteristics of the deformation field such as velocity, strain, and material flow, to be obtained at high spatial and temporal resolution. The velocity distributions in the primary deformation zone and along the tool rake face have been obtained by applying a particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique to sequences of high-speed images of the chip-tool interface taken through the transparent tool, and of the primary deformation zone recorded from a side of the workpiece. A procedure is presented and demonstrated for determining the strain and strain rate distributions in the primary deformation zone. The measurements have provided data about the variations of velocity, strain rate, and strain, in and around the cutting edge and primary deformation zone; confirmed the existence of a region of retarded sliding in the region of intimate contact between tool and chip; and highlighted the occurrence of a region of dead metal ahead of the cutting edge when cutting with a negative rake angle tool.