Abstract
Lower surface roughness and sharper cutting edge are beneficial for improving the machining quality of the cutting tool, while coatings often deteriorate them. Focusing on the diamond coated WC-Co milling cutter, the abrasive flow machining (AFM) is selected for reducing the surface roughness and sharpening the cutting edge. Comparative cutting tests are conducted on different types of coated cutters before and after AFM, as well as uncoated WC-Co one, demonstrating that the boron-doped microcrystalline and undoped fine-grained composite diamond coated cutter after the AFM (AFM-BDM-UFGCD) is a good choice for the finish milling of the 6063 Al alloy in the present case, because it shows favorable machining quality close to the uncoated one, but much prolonged tool lifetime. Besides, compared with the micro-sized diamond films, it is much more convenient and efficient to finish the BDM-UFGCD coated cutter covered by nano-sized diamond grains, and resharpen its cutting edge by the AFM, owing to the lower initial surface roughness and hardness. Moreover, the boron incorporation and micro-sized grains in the underlying layer can enhance the film-substrate adhesion, avoid the rapid film removal in the machining process, and thus maximize the tool life (1040 m, four times more than the uncoated one). In general, the AFM is firstly proposed and discussed for post-processing the diamond coated complicated cutting tools, which is proved to be feasible for improving the cutting performance
Highlights
Various types of aluminum (Al) alloys are used in many industrial fields, such as the aerospace industry, automotive industry, cable industry, as a result of the nice mechanical and technological properties, such as the high tensile strength, high strength to weight ratio, favorable corrosion resistance, nice castability and machinability [1]
As-fabricated diamond coated milling cutters are named based on the type of the selected diamond film, i.e., undoped micro-crystalline diamond (UMCD), UFGD, boron-doped micro-crystalline diamond (BDMCD), boron-doped fine-grained diamond (BDFGD) and BDM-UFGCD, while the diamond coated milling cutters after abrasive flow machining (AFM) are named by adding a prefix of AFM, for example, AFM-UMCD
The R-WC milling cutter after the pretreatment but before the deposition of the diamond film is characterized in some respects, which is named as P-R-WC
Summary
Various types of aluminum (Al) alloys are used in many industrial fields, such as the aerospace industry, automotive industry, cable industry, as a result of the nice mechanical and technological properties, such as the high tensile strength, high strength to weight ratio, favorable corrosion resistance, nice castability and machinability [1]. The employment of the turning or milling cutters made of the monocrystalline diamond is believed as the best choice for finish machining Al alloy workpieces, regardless of the cost, which can be directly used for mirror finishing [7, 8] It is another option to adopt the polycrystalline diamond (PCD) as the cutting edges [9, 10], the wear resistance of which is undoubtedly much higher than that of WC-Co, while lower than those of the monocrystalline diamond and CVD diamond film. The tool lifetime of the milling cutter is another pivotal factor to evaluate its performance, which is dependent on the surface hardness and the wear resistance and the film-substrate adhesion, because the film removal acts as the main failure mode in applications of diamond coated cutting tools [20, 21]. The latter two were determined, so the former was the only control variable for different specimens
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