Effect of surface line/regular hexagonal texture on tribological performance of cemented carbide tool for machining Ti-6Al-4V alloys

Ti-6Al-4V alloy has low thermal conductivity, poor machinability, and active chemical activity. However, it is easily bonded to tool surface in the cutting process, resulting in drastic tool wear. The friction contact state and friction behavior between the tool and machined surface can be significantly improved when adopting tool with micro texture on the surface. The tools with line texture, regular hexagonal texture, and without texture on the rake face were adopted in this study. The cutting force, tool wear morphology, and friction coefficient of different type of tools are analyzed based on dry cutting test, friction, and wear test of cemented carbide and titanium alloy. The result shows that the cutting force caused by the line-textured tool is the smallest, following by hexagonal-textured tool and no-textured tool. However, large damage would happen at the cutting edge of line-textured tool as the cutting continues, while the damage of hexagonal-textured tool is relatively light. The main cutting force and feed force of the three kinds of tools increase as cutting depth increased, while decrease with the increase of cutting speed. The wear morphology of textured tool is smoother than that of no-textured tool, due to the micro texture can contain debris and reduce friction coefficient. A cutting force equation is established by ridge regression method based on actual cutting data, which provides a new idea for monitoring the tool during cutting process.