THE EFFECT OF THE GAS INLET ON THE FLUID FIELD DURING FABRICATING HFCVD DIAMOND-COATED CUTTING TOOLS

Abstract

In the present study, the fluid field in a process of fabricating diamond coated cutting tools using the hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) method is investigated using the finite volume method (FVM), in which the effects of the inlet height, gas initial velocity, inlet radius and arrangement are illustrated in terms of the gas velocity magnitude and vector distribution near the filaments and the flute surface of cutting tools. In the simulations, the coupling effect of the temperature and the gas field is also considered by simultaneously calculating the temperature distribution. The simulation results suggest that either shortening the distance between the gas inlet and filaments, or increasing the gas initial velocity is helpful for the reactive gas arriving at filaments surface and being dissociated. Furthermore, increasing the inlet area is able to significantly increase the velocity of gas field around the filaments, as well as produce a much more uniform gas velocity field. Based on this conclusion, two novel multi-inlets setups are proposed to further improve the generated gas field and the simulation results show that the most superior gas field can be achieved with the one including 8 larger central inlets and 24 smaller outskirt inlets. Finally, an actual deposition experiment is carried out and its result indicates that adopting the optimized such inlet arrangement could generate a highly uniform and homogeneous growth environment on whole deposition area.