Diamond micro-cutting of the difficult -to -cut materials using Electrolysis

전기분해를 이용한 난삭재의 다이아몬드 미세가공

This paper presents a new cutting method, i.e. diamond cutting, aided by electrolysis, in order to cut ferrous materials with diamond tools. Diamond cutting is widely applied in manufacturing ultraprecision parts such as magnetic disk, polygon mirror, spherical/non-spherical mirror and copier drum, etc. because of the diamond tool edge sharpness. In general, however, diamond cutting cannot be applied to cutting steels, because diamond tools wear excessively in cutting iron based materials like steel due to their high chemical interaction with iron in high temperature. In order to suppress the diffusion of carbon from the diamond tool and to reduce increase of cutting force due to size effect, we attempt to change chemically the compositions of iron based materials using electrolysis in a limited part which will be soon cut. Through experiments under several micro-machining and electrolysis conditions, cutting using electrolysis, compared to conventional cutting, was found to result in a great decrease of the cutting force, a better surface and much less wear tool.