Assessment on abrasiveness of high chromium cast iron material on the wear performance of PCBN cutting tools in dry machining

Polycrystalline Cubic Boron Nitride (PCBN) has been considered as the main cutting tool material for hard turning, which has the comparable surface finish quality as grinding, and high efficiency, economical technology in production. It is well known that the abrasiveness of the workpiece have the very important role of the machinability of the materials. Therefore, the tool wear of the PCBN insert correlates with abrasiveness of the materials very much. In the presented paper, the influence of the micro hardness distribution is used to explain the wear mechanism in machining of the high abrasive materials and proposed a model to predict the abrasiveness. The work material is high chromium cast iron and cutting tool material is PCBN. Abrasiveness are evaluated from the micro hardness distribution by nanoindentation for the distinguish microstructure with hardness. The mapping image of the micro hardness showed the matched features with microstructure images from the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The different chemical composition groups are presented as three heat treatment conditions in experiments, which are as-cast, annealed and hardened. Based on the hardness distribution, this paper presented a model to evaluate the abrasiveness index of the material. The high performance machining is done on six material. The wear mechanism is abrasion in tool wear dominantly and flank wear showed the linear relationship with abrasiveness index. The abrasive wear on the cutting edge suggests that sliding and chipping are the main wear modes which is caused by the combination effect of carbides and matrix. The four mechanisms of diffusion, chemical, abrasive and micro chipping are happening in the tool wear of hard turning. In the dry machining by PCBN insert, abrasiveness is correlated with abrasive and chipping very much and accelerated the crater wear in machining. Abrasiveness index of the material has ability to predict wear performance in dry machining of HCWCI materials by PCBN inserts. The application of the abrasiveness is a potential parameter of machinability to improve the machining efficiency and reduce the cost of machining.