Study on Toughness Mechanism of Ceramic Cutting Tools

Ceramic cutting tools can be used in metal cutting, and can keep their hardness, strength, abrasion resistance and long performance life under high cutting speed. With these special mechanical properties, ceramic cutting tools and hard alloy cutting tools with ceramic coat will certainly substitute high speed steel cutting tools in many fields. But the fatal weakness of brittleness of ceramic materials makes their reliability lower. The mechanical properties of ceramic cutting tools, such as toughness, strength, abrasion resistance and fatigue resistance, can be improved by rare earth additives. In this paper, a various kinds of methods, such as bio-inspired preparation, nano technique, granule dispersion, grain fiber, stress inducing phase change, microcracks, residual stress, and phase change, synergistic toughening and strengthening, were studied in improving the toughness of ceramic cutting materials.