Development and Performance of PDC Cutters

1. Development of PDC cutter

As a superhard tool material, diamond has been used in machining for hundreds of years. In the process of tool development, from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, the tool material was mainly represented by high-speed steel;

In 1927, Germany first developed cemented carbide cutting tool materials and was widely used; in the 1950s, synthetic diamond was synthesized in Sweden and the United States, and cutting tools entered a period represented by superhard materials.

In the 1970s, polycrystalline diamond (PDC) was synthesized by high-pressure synthesis technology, which solved the problems of scarcity and high price of natural diamond, and extended the application scope of PDC cutters to aviation, aerospace, automobiles, electronics, stone, etc. multiple fields.

2. The performance characteristics of PDC cutter

The PDC cutter has the characteristics of high hardness, high compressive strength, good thermal conductivity and wear resistance, and can obtain high machining accuracy and machining efficiency in high-speed cutting.

The above properties of PDC compacts are determined by the diamond crystal state.

In diamond crystals, the four valence electrons of carbon atoms form bonds in a tetrahedral structure, and each carbon atom forms covalent bonds with four adjacent atoms to form a diamond structure, which has strong binding force and directionality. So that the PDC tool has a very high hardness.

Since the structure of polycrystalline diamond (PDC) is a fine-grained diamond sintered body with different orientations, its hardness and wear resistance are still lower than those of single-crystal diamond despite the addition of a binder. However, since the sintered PDC cutter is isotropic, it is not easy to crack along a single cleavage plane.

3. Application of PDC cutter

The research on PDC cutter was carried out earlier in industrialized countries, and its application has been relatively mature.

Since the synthetic diamond was first synthesized in Sweden in 1953, the research on the cutting performance of PDC compacts has obtained a lot of results, and the application scope and usage of PDC tools have expanded rapidly.

The application range of PDC cutter has been extended from initial turning to drilling and milling.

China's PDC cutter market continues to expand with the development of cutting tool technology. Many wood-based panel companies also use PDC cutters for wood product processing. The application of PDC cutters has further promoted the research on its design and manufacturing technology.

At present, the processing range of PDC cutter has expanded from traditional metal cutting to stone processing, wood processing, metal matrix composite materials, glass, engineering ceramics and other materials.

Through the analysis of the application of PDC cutters for sale in recent years, it can be seen that PDC tools are mainly used in the following two aspects:

① Processing of difficult-to-machine non-ferrous metal materials: When using ordinary tools to process difficult-to-machine non-ferrous metal materials, defects such as easy tool wear and low processing efficiency often occur, while PDC cutters can show good processing performance.

② Processing of difficult-to-machine non-metallic materials: PDC cutters are very suitable for the processing of difficult-to-machine non-metallic materials such as stone, hard carbon, carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP), and artificial boards.

At present, the application of laminate flooring and other wood-based boards (such as MDF) is becoming more and more extensive. Processing these materials with PDC cutters can effectively avoid defects such as easy tool wear.