Forces in Green Micromachining of Ceramics: An Experimental Investigation on Micromachining of Aluminum Nitride

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation of green micromachining (GMM) forces during orthogonal micromachining green-state AlN ceramics. Green-state ceramics contain ceramic powders within a binder; processed samples are subsequently debound and sintered to obtain solid ceramic parts. An effective approach to create microscale features on ceramics is to use mechanical micromachining when the ceramics are at their green state. This approach, referred to as GMM, considerably reduces the forces and tool wear with respect to micromachining of sintered ceramics. As such, fundamental understanding on GMM of ceramics is critically needed. To this end, in this work, the force characteristics of powder injection molded AlN ceramics with two different binder states were experimentally investigated via orthogonal cutting. The effects of micromachining parameters on force components and specific energies were experimentally identified for a tungsten carbide (WC) and a single crystal diamond tools. As expected, the thrust forces were seen to be significantly larger than the cutting forces at low uncut chip thicknesses when using the carbide tool with its large edge radius. The cutting forces are found to be more sensitive to uncut chip thickness than the thrust forces are. When a sharp diamond tool is used, cutting forces are significantly larger than the thrust forces even for small uncut chip thicknesses. The specific energies follow an exponential decrease with increasing uncut chip thickness similar to the common trends in metal cutting. However, due to interaction characteristics between cutting edge and ceramic particles in the green body, evidence of plowing and rubbing along the cutting region was observed even with a sharp diamond tool.