Diamond-reinforced cutting tools using laser-based additive manufacturing.

Production-volume and cost requirements currently limit machine tool manufacturers' ability to produce application-specific tooling with traditional methods, motivating the development of innovative manufacturing technologies. To this end, we detail a manufacturing framework for the design and production of application-specific cutting tools based on industry standard tungsten carbide-cobalt (WC-Co)-based "carbide" cutting materials using additive manufacturing (AM). Herein, novel diamond-reinforced carbide structures were designed and manufactured via AM and subsequently tested in comparison to current commercial products that are traditionally-processed. The resulting diamond-reinforced composites were free from large scale cracking and maintained microstructures with multiple reinforcing phases. Diamond incorporation had a remarkable effect on the processing, microstructure, and machining performance of the WC-Co based material in comparison to a commercial carbide cutting tool of similar composition as well as the base WC-Co matrix. Detailed microstructure and phase analysis, as well as machining experiments, demonstrate the ability to exploit laser-based directed energy deposition (DED)-based AM to create multifunctional cutting tools that can be designed to meet ever-increasing manufacturing demands across many industries.