Manufacturing tool materials must have high hot hardness and wear resistance, the necessary bending strength, impact toughness, and chemical inertness, good manufacturability, machining, forging and heat treatment, etc.), and not easy to deformation.
Usually when materials, high hardness, wear resistance and high; High bending strength, impact toughness is high also. But the material hardness is higher, the flexural strength and impact toughness is the lower. High speed steel by high flexural strength and impact toughness, and good machinability, modern is still the most widely used tool material, followed by cemented carbide.
Polycrystalline cubic boron nitride is suitable for cutting high hardness of the hardened steel and hard cast iron, etc.; Polycrystalline diamond cutting is suitable for nonferrous metals, and alloys, plastics and glass reinforced plastics, etc.; Carbon tool steel and alloy tool steel are now used for file tool, die and tap, etc.
Cemented carbide indexable inserts are now using chemical vapor deposition coating titanium carbide, titanium nitride, alumina hard layer or composite hard layer. Is the development of the physical vapor deposition method not only can be used for the carbide cutting tools, also can be used for high speed steel cutting tools, like drill bits, milling cutter and hob, tap. Hard coating as barrier hinder chemical diffusion and heat conduction, the tool wear and tear when cutting speed slow, coating blade life compared with no coating is about 1 ~ 3 times of above.
Because under the high temperature and high pressure, high speed, and corrosive fluid in work in parts, the application of hard machining materials is increasing, cutting processing level of automation and more and more high to the requirement of machining accuracy. In order to adapt to this kind of situation, the development direction of cutter will be the development and application of new cutting tool materials; Tool vapor deposition coating technology further development, in the substrate on the deposition of high toughness of high strength, higher hardness of the coating to better solve the contradictions between the cutting tool material hardness and strength; The structure of the further development of indexable tool; Manufacturing precision of the cutting tool, reducing the difference of product quality, and for optimization of tool use.
Cutting tool materials are the following categories: high speed steel, cemented carbide, ceramics, metal ceramics, polycrystalline cubic boron nitride and polycrystalline diamond.
Here mainly to ceramics, ceramics for earlier than cemented carbide cutting tools, but due to its brittleness, development is slow. But since the 1970 s, and obtained fast development. Ceramic cutting tool materials mainly has two department, namely, aluminum oxide and silicon nitride. Ceramic as a cutting tool with low cost, high hardness, high temperature resistant performance is good wait for an advantage, have very good prospects. At present at home and abroad product difference is very big, the cutting tool is a high technology goods.