ANTISHICNC CNC Turning Milling Machines,CNC Lathes
In the field of metal cutting, the development of metal cutting machine tools and the development of tool materials are complementary. The development of tool materials has promoted the progress of metal cutting processing technology to a certain extent. Tool materials have gradually developed from carbon tool steel to today’s cemented carbide and superhard materials (ceramics, cubic boron nitride, polycrystalline diamond, etc.) with the increase of machine tool spindle speed, power, spindle accuracy, and machine tool rigidity. At the same time, the continuous emergence of new engineering materials has also promoted the development of cutting tool materials.
At present, the tool materials used in metal cutting technology are mainly high-speed steel tools, cemented carbide tools, ceramic tools, cubic boron nitride tools and polycrystalline diamond tools. High-speed steel tools, cemented carbide tools and coated cemented carbide tools are commonly used on CNC machine tools.
Advantages of commonly used tool materials for lathes
1. High-speed steel
High-speed steel is an alloy tool steel containing more alloy elements such as W (tungsten), Mo (molybdenum), Cr (chromium), and V (vanadium). It is a tool material with relatively good comprehensive performance. After heat treatment, the hardness HRC can reach 62~66, the bending strength is about 3.3GPa, and the heat resistance is about 600℃. It can withstand large cutting forces and impact forces. In addition, high-speed steel also has the advantages of small heat treatment deformation, forging, and easy grinding of sharp edges. It is particularly suitable for manufacturing various small and complex-shaped tools, such as forming turning tools, various drills, milling cutters, broaches, gear tools, and thread tools. At the same time, due to the advancement of heat treatment technology for high-speed steel tools and the development of forming metal cutting technology, the red hardness, wear resistance, and surface coating quality of high-speed steel tools have been greatly improved. Therefore, high-speed steel is still one of the tool materials selected for CNC machine tools.
2. Cemented carbide
Cemented carbide is a powder metallurgy product made by sintering micron-sized powders of high-hardness, refractory metal compounds (WC, TiC, TaC, NbC, etc.) with metal binders such as Co, Mo, and Ni. The commonly used binder is Co, while the binders of titanium carbide-based cemented carbide are Mo and Ni. The content of high-temperature carbides in cemented carbide exceeds that of high-speed steel. It has the characteristics of high hardness (greater than HRA89), high melting point, good chemical stability and good thermal stability. The cutting efficiency is 5 to 10 times that of high-speed steel tools. However, cemented carbide has poor toughness, high brittleness, and low ability to withstand impact and vibration. Cemented carbide is still the main tool material.
3. Ceramics
Ceramic tools are a kind of tool material sintered at high temperature with AL203 (aluminum oxide) or Si3N4 (silicon nitride) as the matrix and a small amount of metal added. Its hardness HRA can reach 91 to 95, and its wear resistance is more than ten times higher than that of cemented carbide. It is suitable for processing cold cast iron and quenched steel. Ceramic tools have good anti-stick properties, low affinity with many metals, good chemical stability, and do not react with steel even when melted.
The biggest disadvantage of ceramic tools is high brittleness, low bending strength and impact toughness, and poor thermal conductivity.
4. Cubic Boron Nitride
Cubic Boron Nitride (CBN) is made of hexagonal boron nitride (commonly known as white graphite) as raw material, using ultra-high temperature and high pressure technology to transform it. Its crystal structure is similar to that of diamond. Cubic boron nitride blades have good “red hardness” and can cut high-temperature alloys at high speeds. The cutting speed is 3 to 5 times higher than that of cemented carbide. It can cut lightly and sharply at a high temperature of 1300℃. The performance is extremely excellent, and the service life is 20 to 200 times that of cemented carbide. Using cubic boron nitride tools, special steels that could only be processed by grinding methods before can be processed, and high dimensional accuracy and excellent surface roughness can be obtained, realizing turning instead of grinding. It has excellent chemical stability and is suitable for processing steel materials. Although its thermal conductivity is worse than that of diamond, it is much higher than other materials. Its bending strength and fracture toughness are between that of cemented carbide and ceramics. Therefore, cubic boron nitride is very suitable for CNC machine tool processing tools.
5. Diamond
Diamond tools are divided into three categories: natural diamond, artificial polycrystalline diamond and composite diamond blades.
Diamond has extremely high hardness, good thermal conductivity and small friction coefficient, excellent service life (more than dozens of times higher than the service life of cemented carbide tools), stable processing size accuracy (can process thousands to tens of thousands of pieces) and good workpiece surface roughness (turning non-ferrous metals can reach Ra0.06um or more), and can be cut stably at the nanometer level. Diamond tool ultra-precision processing is widely used in laser scanners and high-speed camera scanning prisms, special optical parts, television, video recorder, camera parts, computer disks, silicon wafers in the electronics industry and other fields.
Except for a few ultra-precision processing and special uses, artificial polycrystalline diamond (PCD) is mostly used as tool material or abrasive material in industry. Artificial polycrystalline diamond (PCD) is formed by sintering artificial diamond particles at high temperature (above 1200℃) and high pressure by adding Co, cemented carbide, NiCr, Si-SiC and ceramic binder. The main processing objects of PCD tools are non-ferrous metals, such as aluminum alloys, copper alloys, magnesium alloys, etc., and are also used to process titanium alloys, gold, silver, platinum and various ceramic products. For various non-metallic materials, such as graphite, rubber, plastic, glass, bamboo and wood materials containing Al2O3 layers, the processing effect of using PCD tools is very good. PCD tools have the advantages of long tool life and high metal removal rate when processing aluminum workpieces.
The disadvantage is that the tool is expensive and the processing cost is high.
6. Coated tools
Tool surface coating technology is a high-quality surface modification technology. It uses chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or physical vapor deposition (PVD) to coat a thin layer (5~12μm) of high-hardness refractory metal compounds (TC, TiN, Al203, etc.) on the surface of ordinary high-speed steel and carbide blades. This allows the blade to maintain the strength and toughness of the ordinary blade matrix, while also making the surface have high hardness and wear resistance, a smaller friction coefficient and high heat resistance, which better solves the contradiction between material hardness, strength and toughness.
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