A new sawing machine by diamond wire

Diamond wire is widely used for stone cutting; it is typically employed to extract a block in quarry and to square the block in a machining company. In particular, the frames to square or to cut the blocks present many technological limits, such as the high costs of the diamond wire, the frequent break of the diamond wire during cutting, the poor quality of cut surfaces, and the dangerous process and productivity lower than that of the same tool used in a quarry. The present work shows an innovative prototype machine to cut by a diamond wire which overcomes the aforementioned technological limits. The developed machine has a bridge frame among which two pulleys move the diamond wire as regards the stone block according with the feed speed. The diamond wire moves on the two pulleys with a cutting speed. A tensile force is applied to the wire that twists it during the contact with the stone, instead of keeping it along a straight direction parallel to the foundation of the machine. The twisting of the diamond wire makes the use of the wire itself more productive and safer, since the wear of each single bead during cutting is more uniform. Moreover, the resulting specific pressure acts on each bead along the arc of contact with the cut block and increases along the cutting direction from the entrance to the exit of the contact with the stone. The increasing of the specific pressure causes a bending of the diamond wire during the contact with the stone. The developed prototype was provided with a sensory system to measure both the cutting power and the tensile force of the diamond wire during experimental tests. In this way it was possible to verify the functionality of the prototype plant and, in the same time, to evaluate the productivity of the implemented cutting process.