Experiments of rock cutting with nano-cemented carbide

Nano cemented carbide is a new style cutter material. Because its grain size is very small, it is superior to common cemented carbide in properties, such as high hardness, fracture toughness, flexural strength and higher abrasion resistance. It is proposed to have wide application prospect to tools and mould manufacturing, machinery manufacturing, geological drilling, mining, oil field development, etc. In this paper, nano cemented carbide tool was ground with ELID technology, and the marble were cut with nano cemented carbide, and the cutting properties of nano cemented carbide were studied. Results imply that the tool life of nano cemented carbide is 0.5-1 times longer than that of common cemented carbide at low cutting speed. Which means the nano cemented carbide is more suitable for machining hard and brittle material than common cemented carbides at low cutting speed. And the microscopic analysis showed, the mechanism of tool wear is the abrasive wear as well as the shedding of WC hard phase within Co phase caused by the hard spots shed from the marble embedding in the internal part of binder phase Co which is located in the hard phase WC.