Wear mechanisms during dry and wet turning of Inconel 718 with ceramic tools

The growing demand for products that resist in environments considered severe has stimulated in the last years series of researches. They have the objective to improve the properties of materials and their processing and applications. Among the metals commonly used in extreme temperature and corrosion, there are the nickel superalloys, in particular Inconel 718. However, the same thermal, mechanical, and metallurgical properties, which make it a material of great applicability, also characterized as one of the metals of low machinability. Given that the market trend is increasingly using special materials such as superalloys, a detailed study about the machining of these materials is strategic and it is necessary that companies constantly seek to improve their processes. Besides that, the attention to environmentally safe processes from society and governmental regulation is growing. Therefore, this paper evaluated the performance of different conditions, dry and wet, on external longitudinal turning of Inconel 718 with ceramic tools, identifying the mechanisms and types of predominant wear. For both conditions, notch wear was the main type observed in the experiments and it was more evident during dry machining.