SUPERHARD COATINGS FOR METAL-CUTTING APPLICATIONS

An effective metal cutting tool is usually a combination of a hard coating and a tough substrate. The successful deposition of diamond outside its thermodynamic stability range has stimulated the development of a new class of cutting tools: those with diamond coated inserts at any desired style and edge geometry. The successful implementation of diamond coatings also expedited similar research in the deposition of cubic boron nitride. This paper presents superhard coated tools, with an emphasis on diamond coated WC-Co tools, the corresponding deposition technologies and the foreseen metal cutting applications.