Scientists of the Department of Materials Science in Mechanical Engineering, NSTU NETI have developed a ceramic composite material that is superior in quality to its domestic equivalents. This material is designed for the production of indexable inserts in mechanical engineering and has been tested at two enterprises in Novosibirsk.
The developed ceramic composite material is used for the manufacture of tools for machining materials that are difficult to process with widespread carbide counterparts. This applies mainly to the machining of hardened steels. The task for scientists was to create a material that was simple to produce and use, yet effective.
"This material is unique as it can be mass-produced using the most cost-effective modern technology. The industry widely uses a hot-pressing method for this kind of ceramics; its disadvantage is a limited number of parts that can be produced simultaneously. We use free sintering at furnaces that can sinter large batches, literally thousands of pieces at a time, which means that mass production becomes more profitable," said Sergey Veselov, Associate Professor at the Department of Materials Science in Mechanical Engineering, NSTU NETI.
The basis of this material is aluminum oxide with carbide additives, which is widely used in industry. The main difficulty is caused by the chemical reactions between the components, which occur during material sintering and worsen the properties of the sintered ceramics. It is possible to neutralize this reaction with the developed ceramic compositions.
The technological process of manufacturing this composite material is devised as simply as possible to be used in mass production. The development is completely ready for industrial use.
Indexable inserts made of the developed material have passed preliminary tests at two enterprises in Novosibirsk, one of them mainly using domestic cutting tools for machining. During the trial run of the new cutting plates there, the material created at NSTU NETI proved to be of higher quality and resistance. Another enterprise uses European tools, and by comparison of performance figures, the developed plates were similar in quality, but winning in cost, since the price of foreign equivalents is many times higher than the NSTU NETI scientists' development.