Tool Materials Selection in Aerospace Manufacturing Industry

With wide applications of difficult-to-machine materials in aerospace, how to correctly select suitable tool materials for cutting, reduce the processing cost, and increase the productivity are important problems we are faced with. Cutting tool materials should match with mechanical properties, physical properties, chemical properties of workpieces.

As cutting tool and machine tool technologies are combined with each other, the aerospace manufacturing industry is developing rapidly. The continuous development of tool materials is a driving force of the aerospace manufacturing industry development.

At present, there are as many as thousands of tool material brands widely used in aerospace manufacturing industry. According to cutting tool material, they can be divided into the following categories: tool steel (carbon tool steel, alloy tool steel, high speed steel), hard alloy, ceramic and superhard cutting tool materials. Carbon tool steel is suitable for manufacturing manual tools, and carbon tool steel T10A and T12A are widely applied.

In aerospace manufacturing industry, hard alloy cutter accounts for the largest proportion, and actually it is dominant cutter in aerospace manufacturing, and itrs application scope is quite widespread. Hard alloy as the main tool material, makes the machining achieve the transition to the era of hard alloy. Because different types of hard alloys have different performance characteristics, their applications are also different.

YT hard alloy has most of the excellent properties of YG and YW hard alloy, widely used in aerospace manufacturing industry. Hard alloy with coating has higher hardness, wear resistance, heat resistance than the matrix, and wide applications. Ultra-fine grain hard alloy can be used in wide intermittent cutting. Titanium carbon-base alloy is mainly used for continuous surface finishing and semifinishing of steel castings.