Advances in High-Speed Milling of Metal Matrix Composites

Abstract

Particle reinforced metal matrix composites (PMMC) possess many outstanding properties and are increasingly applied in automobile, aerospace, electronics and medical industries. However, PMMC is a typical difficult-to-machining material due to the rapid tool wear rate and excessive machining induced defects. Although large amount of investigations have been done on the conventional machining of PMMC, merely several researchers have dedicated themselves to the study of milling, especially high speed milling of this material. Within the milling studies, most researchers have selected the carbide coated or uncoated solid carbide tools whose tool life was not satisfactory for engineering application. The literatures review indicates that most researchers limited their study to sintering or casting SiCp/Al composites at the low or moderate cutting speed. Material produced by the in-situ reaction method or titanium matrix composites was seldom selected as the research object. The research content was limited to the effect of cutting parameters on the machined surface quality or cutting forces. It is suggested that high-speed milling with PCD tool should be conducted in order to improve the machined surface quality and material removal rate and decrease the machining cost. Tool life modeling, surface roughness prediction, cutting parameters optimization and high-speed milling data base and the expert system should be greatly noticed by the researchers.