Tungsten Carbide Cutting Tool Developments

With more and more materials difficult to manufacture and the popularity and development of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine tools, the requirements of cutting tool is higher and higher correspondly, especially in cutting accuracy, cutting efficiency, reliability and customization. Conventional cutting tool materials are difficult to meet the requirements of high efficiency and low production cost of modern manufacturing industry, so tungsten carbide has played an important role in cutting fields gradually because of it excellent performance. Tungsten carbide materials mainly composed of a hard phase WC and Co binder phase, WC phase is mainly responsible for the contribution of abrasion resistance, and Co phase is to assume the role of enhanced toughness. However, the wear resistance and toughness is always a contradiction difficult to be reconciled, the wear resistance enhanced and the toughness weakened correspondly, and vice versa. In order to reconcile the contradiction, the relevant researchers have studied further and through strengthening the binder phase, heat treatment, surface coatings and functionally graded structure to prepare a variety of new alloy, which has both high toughness and high wear resistance.

At present, the major trends of tungsten carbide cutting tools include functional gradient structure, high Co content and fine grain structure and coated tungsten carbide. Functional gradient structure carbide is based on the principle of FGM (Functionally graded materials) and change the micro-structure distribution of conventional tungsten carbide to form gradient structure in one-dimensional, two-dimensional space and even three-dimensional space. It can remarkably improve the cutting efficiency and extend the service life of the cutting tools; high Co content and fine grain carbide, the density, hardness and strength of the fine grain cemented carbide were significantly higher than normal grain carbide, then increases Co content appropriately, which not only can meet modern industry and special applications of new materials processing needs, especially for the manufacture of high load, high stress and wear sharp precision molds and tools; coated tungsten carbide deposits a thin wear resistance layer to improve the wear resistance on the base. Furthermore, the coating layer can combine different elements to achieve single or multilayer according to different requirements.

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