Adaptive Surface Engineering of High Performance Manufacturing Tooling

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Manufacturing is an important part of the Canadian economy and continues to hold considerable promise as global economic growth drives the demand for manufactured goods. Being in a high labour cost region Canadian industry has had to make significant investments in advanced manufacturing equipment in order to be competitive. Tooling plays an important role in how effective this large capital base of equipment is as it often sets the productivity level, impacts cost and quality and in many cases limits the types of materials that can be processed. Coatings have been shown to greatly enhance the performance of tooling by providing added wear protection and lubricity. As part of my previous Discovery Grant, a novel nano-multilayered TiAlCrSiYN/TiAlCrN PVD coating was developed for machining hard to cut materials. This development was based on enhancing the ability of the coating to adapt to its conditions by forming lubricious and protective tribofilms. The main purpose of this proposed research program is to better understand the tribofilm formation mechanisms which underlie this improvement and use this knowledge to develop a new generation of adaptive surface engineered solutions which form protective and lubricious tribofilms tailored to the specific requirements of the application. The major impact of this research will be to develop a deeper understanding of how protective and lubricious tribofilms are generated and sustained over the life of a tool and the role they play in reducing friction and wear. These aspects will be explored by altering coating composition and microstructure and by using ion implantation and fine particle bombardment techniques as well as selective workpiece alloying, for example. These techniques will be applied with the aim of generating the initial surface conditions needed to favourably adapt the tool and activate the tribo-chemical reactions during the initial running-in stage of wear. This is important as the running-in stage has a big impact on overall wear behaviour. Given that tribofilms are very delicate in nature, innovative sample preparation techniques will be developed to better preserve the tribofilms on the extremely hard tool materials. These will be applied to establish the chemical composition and structure of the tribofilms, including the nature of its bond with the tool substrate and its evolution over time. This information will then be correlated to friction properties, as well as wear rates and wear mechanisms for specific tool, workpiece and environment combinations. Once beneficial surface treatments are developed detailed optimization studies will be performed to establish the machine operating conditions which fully exploit the beneficial properties of the tribofilms. Following detailed laboratory testing the surface treatments will be tested in production at our industrial partners’ sites. This collaboration provides a direct link of our academic research to the Canadian manufacturing industry and will lead to quick adoption of the novel solutions. The knowledge gained from this research will enhance the productivity of machining operations by developing solutions able to withstand the extreme operating conditions associated with high performance machining and new difficult to cut alloys. The improved lubricity of at the tool interface will enhance quality by reducing the surface and subsurface damage generated by poor chip formation and flow. The longer tool life expected will reduce tooling cost per part as well as the amount of low value added manual labour associated with setting up and changing tools and tracking offsets. Collectively these improvements represent a significant competitive edge that will drive growth in Canadian manufacturing.