Ecological Assessment of Coated Cemented Carbide Tools and Their Behavior during Machining

Abstract

In the last years and even decades the research on ecological evaluation models has grown. Both procedures for entire companies or plants as well as methods for describing single processes have been developed. Therefore the demand for process oriented approaches which can be aggregated into considerations of higher levels is prevailing.

In machining the use of coated cutting tools is widely known and accepted. Up to now the additional expenses for coating the tool with PVD or CVD procedures are evaluated from an economic point of view. Although several approaches have been introduced in order to ecologically evaluate coated cutting tools and their behavior during machining, there is still a demand for further specification.

This paper concentrates on the ecological evaluation of PVD coatings and their respective effect in machining, e.g. longer cutting times or increased material removal rates. The presented procedure provides an intuitive evaluation scheme for determining the advantage of coated cutting tools. Furthermore an approach for assessing the ecological impact of coated cemented carbide tools will be demonstrated and used within the evaluation. In this context the connection to the manufactured product has to be established. This is achieved by attributing the expenses for the coated tools to the number of produced parts, which is changing due to the different tool life regarding the usage of coatings. The presented approaches can be used for ecological and economic evaluation procedures and contribute to ecological process models.