Analysis of Application Prospects of Diamond Tools Market
October 22, 2018
Diamond tool non-ferrous metal wear-resistant material processing applications, has excellent adaptability. Tool material, diamond is the hardest. Under suitable processing conditions, diamond has a longer service life than high-speed steels, hard alloys, ceramics, and polycrystalline cubic boron nitride. It also has deficiencies and generally does not apply to the processing of ferrous materials. But high-speed mass production, processing of materials such as aluminum and graphite, diamond is often the most effective tool.
When using diamond tools, users have two options: a polycrystalline diamond (PCD), and a newer chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond.
The use performance has long proven that polycrystalline diamond has natural diamond hardness and strength abrasion resistance, but no natural diamond is sensitive to breakage. It is made of synthetic diamond particles polymerized under high temperature and high pressure. During the process, polycrystalline particles are formed and bonded to a cemented carbide substrate at the same time to improve mechanical strength and impact resistance.
According to GE's Super Abrasives Department, PCD is very suitable for high-speed aluminum cutting, and is particularly suitable for applications where good surface roughness is essential. It also exhibits excellent performance when it is used to process high wear resistance materials. In general, PCD is recommended for cutting high-silicon aluminum alloys, but also for brass, copper, bronze, and carbide processing. The use process includes car, boring, profiling, grooving, milling and hole machining.
Because of the chemical interaction between diamond and iron, PCD is generally not suitable for processing ferrous materials. But it can deal with bimetallic materials processing, including the combination of aluminum and cast iron. For example: When an auto parts supplier processes an aluminum cast iron bimetal cylinder block, a 305 mm diameter tool-clamp face milling cutter is used, the tip radius is 2.36 mm, and the light knife is used, the cutting speed is 304.8 m/min, and the feed rate is 0.10 mm/tooth. The depth of cut is 5mm. After machining up to 5000 cylinders, the blade needs to be indexed once.
GE's Application Planning Manager believes that PCD applications have been driven by mass production in the industry, and the major automotive industry has been increasing the processing speed of aluminum parts. At the same time, automakers are evaluating the use of metal matrix composites to reduce costs in order to reduce weight. These materials must be processed using PCD. He said: "This kind of material cannot be processed with carbide tools."
Polycrystalline product production manager said that although PCD development achievements have given people a very deep impression, GE Super Abrasives Department continues to work in order to further improve its anti-wear.
The productivity of PCD tools has brought many benefits to the process. Although diamond is the hardest material, its material properties such as toughness still need further study. A factor to improve the toughness of PCD is to add Cobalt element to randomly arrange diamond grains. In addition, the cemented carbide substrate can also provide mechanical support to the diamond abrasive layer, thereby increasing the impact resistance, and the tooling can be easily brazed.
Another advantage of PCD is that the existing various brand series can meet any non-ferrous metal processing needs. In general, fine-grained diamond is used in applications where the material to be processed has low wear resistance and surface roughness requirements are very high; granular diamond is generally used as a generic grade for machining; coarse-grained diamond is used for roughing extraordinary wear-resistant materials, but has a rough surface The degree of demand is not high.
