WC-Co Tool Failure Mechanism in Titanium Alloys Machining

摘要

The 5-axis milling processes were conducted with several uncoated WC-Co tools, which are with taper ball end mills with four flutes. There is a severe problem of high rate of tool failure, which has led to the high cost and low productivity of the milling process. In order to find out the real reason, some former work, which included the tool geometry analysis, tool path and tool posture analysis, as well as the cutting force calculating, had been done. It has been found that most of the tool failures are resulted from cutting edge chipping or the workpiece material of titanium alloys attached to the tool. Meanwhile, a suddenly applied load or an abrupt unloading of the tool at the end of a cut is another important factor. Moreover, the tool materials had been analyzed, which included the element composition analysis with XRD, the microstructure analysis with SEM. XRD results indicate the cobalt at the tip of tool is less than at the shank of tool. SEM results indicate there are micro-cracks concentrated in the cutting edge area. The tool material failure mechanism will be set up based on the tool material analysis in this study.