Manufacture and use of cutting inserts made of different glass ceramics

Abstract

The most commonly used materials for cutting tools worldwide are carbide-based. Its production requires the increasingly scarce metals tungsten and cobalt, the latter is often obtained under ethically questionable circumstances. In addition, a lot of manufacturing effort along the process chain is required to produce the final tool. The intensive manufacturing efforts are what carbide-based tools have in common with other important cutting materials such as cubic boron nitride, ceramics, or synthetic diamond. For this reason, efforts are underway to expand the range of cutting materials beyond current options such as e.g. cemented carbides, high-speed steel, or cubic boron nitride. This work shows that, in principle, glass ceramics can also be included in the investigations. The glass ceramic materials examined here can be ground into indexable inserts and have been successfully used in the machining of polyether ether ketone and aluminum EN AW 2007. These first results are intended to pave the way for further research in this area.