doi:10.3850/978-981-07-0319-6_206

ABSTRACT

The miniaturized parts demand is increasing day by day in several different fields such as medical, transportation, environmental and consumer electronic industries. Micro-mechanical machining offers great potential for manufacturing complex micro moulds for micro components moulding from hardened steels. High quality with respect to shape accuracy, surface quality and wear resistance are the main expected advantages. The necessity of harder materials, arisen from the micro-mould industry to overcome the environmental and economic wastes of the conventional production line, led to the development of work materials with hardness above 50 HRC. The demand for ever more precise components pushes towards the machining of steels already in their final hardened state. Machining strategies, which enable an economic manufacturing of such materials with commercially available cutting tools are under investigation.

This paper deals with the results of an experimental investigation on machinability of hardened steel, based on the use of commercial coated micro end-mills. Fundamental experiments were conducted to determine the influence of micromilling cutting conditions on machined part quality, in terms of surface roughness and burrs dimensions. Tool wear progress has been monitored as well, highlighting that by implementing cutting conditions different from the conventional ones real benefits can be achieved from the final product quality and machining time point of views.

Besides understanding the advantages of such technique, guidelines for the selection of cutting parameters in similar applications can be obtained or a tool for simplifying the selection could be the exploitation of such a research activity.

Keywords: Micromilling, Hardened tool steel, Roughness, Tool wear, Burrs.

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