Nanocrystalline diamond coating tools for machining high-strength Al alloys

Diamond coating tools have been increasingly used for machining advanced materials. Recently, a microwave plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technology was developed to produce diamond coatings which consist of nano-diamond crystals embedded into a hard amorphous diamond-like carbon matrix. In this study, the nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) coating tools were evaluated in machining high-strength aluminum (Al) alloy. The conventional CVD microcrystalline diamond coating (MCD) tools and PCD tools were also tested for performance comparisons. In addition, stress distributions in diamond coating tools, after deposition and during machining, were analyzed using a 2D finite element (FE) thermomechanical model.

The results show that catastrophic failures, reached in all except one machining conditions, limit the NCD tool life, which is primarily affected by the cutting speed. In addition, coating delamination in the worn NCD tools is clearly evident from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and force monitoring in machining can capture the delamination incident. At a high feed, coating delamination may extend to the rake face. Furthermore, SEM observations of coating failure boundaries show intimate coating-substrate contact. Though the NCD tools are inferior to the PCD tools, they substantially outperform the MCD tools, which failed by premature delamination. The diamond coating tools can have high residual stresses from the deposition and stresses at the cutting edge are highly augmented. Further machining loading causes the stress reversal pattern which seems to correlate with the tool wear severity.