Applying constant pressure unit to ductile mode cutting of hard and brittle materials

It is strongly wished that hard and brittle materials could be used in a wide variety of fields because of their great material characteristics. For now, however, minute profiling or high-efficiency cutting of these materials has not yet been put into practice due to their hardness. At the same time, there have been numerous reports available on ductile mode cutting for hard and brittle materials in response to the increasing demand. Very smoothly finished surfaces can reportedly be generated through the work of a material removal mechanism similar to plastic deformation, done by microminiaturizing cutting units with the sharp cutting edges of tools. Because of the extremely narrow ductile mode regions, however, forced cutting processing, which includes cutting work, demands extremely high motion performance or rigidity of machine tools, and this makes it difficult to realize stable ductile mode cutting. On the other hand, pressure cutting processing similar to polishing is known to be capable of producing extremely smooth finished surfaces on hard and brittle materials; this suggests that we could realize stable ductile mode cutting that will always create the same depths of cut by controlling the insertion forces on the tools. In this paper, in order to realize stable ductile mode cutting, we have devised and prototyped a constant pressure cutting device which can regulate cutting forces by regulating supply pressure with air static pressure bearings. We have investigated the relationships between the pressure supplied in the cutting direction and the cutting forces in order to get static pressure characteristics of the prototype device. We have also carried out experiments to cut hard and brittle materials with the prototype constant pressure cutting device mounted on the tool post of an ultraprecision machine tool to prove the effectiveness of the constant pressure cutting device for the ductile mode cutting of hard and brittle materials.