Texturing on Drill Tool Flank Surface for Force Reduction in Surgical Drilling Procedure

Drilling through bone is one of the most widely used machining processes followed during orthopedic surgical procedures for internal fixation of broken or fractured bone. It was observed that assessing and controlling the drill thrust force is a crucial task to be followed to avoid drill bit breakthrough and mechanical damages of the bone. Many works were carried out on optimizing the drilling parameters, but only a very few studies dealt with drill bit modification, until now. In this study, drill bit modification was carried out to control the thrust force in bone drilling. As a procedure, drill bit modeled with 50 µm sized dimples and grooves individually on the flank surface of the drill bit were considered. To determine the effect of textures on thrust force generation, bone drilling simulations were performed using finite element analysis coupled with the elastic–plastic model. To realize the presence of textures on the physical drill bit, laser micro machining was performed, and then a 50 µm sized dimples and grooves on the flank surface was individually generated. The results obtained from the simulations were individually validated using the textured and un-textured drill bits in the bone drilling experiment. Study showed that the thrust force obtained from the groove textured tool had a maximum of 20.90% reduction compared with the un-textured tools. It was also found that the thrust force obtained from the simulation and experimental results had a maximum of 14.58% error.