Modern materials for forming and cutting tools - overview

Materials are an ever-changing field of science with high innovation potential. The knowledge in this subject is fundamental for manufacturing industry. Future products play a decisive role in choosing materials. With new production and processing technologies the quality of materials was improved significantly. Modern heat treatments and high specialized coatings create properties, which lead for example to high speed machining with an excellent productivity. Under these conditions, it is necessary, to develop customized products. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art of modern materials for forming and cutting tools and depicts the investigation on tool steels, cemented carbides, ceramics and materials with very high hardness and describes some selected fields of innovation in these fields.