Crater wear on multi-layered coated carbide inserts when turning three distinct cast irons

This paper focused on the comparative study on the crater wear when cutting flake graphite iron (FGI), compacted graphite iron (CGI) and nodular graphite iron (NGI) because of the reported overwhelming difference in tool life. A series of turning experiments are conducted with FGI, CGI and NGI, with multilayer coated inserts under dry condition. The crater wear profiles obtained from the confocal microscopy are collected to construct the evolution of crater wear. Together with the rake temperature estimated by Finite Element Analysis (FEA) under various cutting conditions, the crater wear data indicated that one unified crater wear model can be constructed by combining two most dominant wear mechanisms, 3-body abrasion and dissolution. The maximum crater depth from the experimentally measured 3D crater profiles and the maximum cutting temperatures from FEM simulations are used to estimate the contributions from the abrasive and dissolution wear. Therefore, the same crater wear mechanisms are involved when cutting FGI, CGI and NGI and the main difference in wear comes from the cutting temperature difference in machining three cast irons.

Automated summary

This study found through experiments and finite element analysis that the same crater wear mechanisms are involved when cutting different types of cast iron, and the main difference lies in the cutting temperature.