A study of the diamond tool wear suppression mechanism in vibration-assisted machining of steel

Inability of machining steel strongly inhibits the application of diamond machining in manufacturing industry, especially in the fields of ultra-precision and micro machining. In recent years, vibration-assisted machining (VAM) has been proved to be capable of efficiently suppressing the diamond tool wear in cutting steel. Currently, the prevailing speculation claimed by most researchers for such suppression is that the tool–workpiece flash temperature was reduced in VAM, which would slow the chemical reaction between iron on steel and carbon on diamond. However, the correctness of this speculation has not been proved by any experimental or theoretical research. In this paper, in order to understand the true wear suppression mechanism of diamond tools in VAM of steel, a study is conducted by measuring the workpiece temperatures and modeling the cutting energy consumption in both VAM and conventional cutting (CC). Based on the comparison results, it is concluded that the cutting temperature and energy consumption in VAM are not smaller than in CC, and hence the reduced diamond tool wear in VAM should not be caused by the claimed reduced temperature, especially when the material removal rate is very small. Finally, based on the EDS analysis and the comparison of experimental results under different air pressure, two probable reasons are proposed for the significantly reduced diamond tool wear in VAM of steel: (i) increase of gas pressure at the tool–workpiece interface and (ii) generation of an oxide layer on the freshly machined surface.