Experimental study on hard turning hardened GCr15 steel with PCBN tool

This paper discusses experimental results of turning experiments on GCr15 bearing steel hardened to 60–64 HRC. The objective was to determine the effect of the cutting parameters on cutting force, chip morphology and resultant workpiece surface quality, more specifically surface texture, microstructural alterations, changes in microhardness and residual stresses distribution. Experiment results show that tensile stress can be produced under some cutting conditions, the machined superficial hardened layer depth shows an increasing tendency with the improvement of the workpiece hardness, and that the surface roughness value shows a decreasing tendency when the workpiece hardness is over 50 HRC.