Machining and Machinability of Advanced Materials

Depending on the material involved, machining can comprise more than 70% of the cost of a part.  Therefore, to enable advanced, high-performance materials like structural ceramics and metal matrix composites to be economically viable, efficient machining processes with high material removal rates are needed.  Experienced FWMUC staff works with users to tailor machining methods to the kind of material and desired shapes.  Our special expertise is in grinding and single-point turning.  Instrumented machine tools enable the mechanics of grinding processes to be documented and the results studied.  Our machine tools include an E. O. Lee creep-feed grinder, a Weldon cylindrical grinder, and a Precitech diamond turning machine. 

Machinability is a characteristic of a material that depicts its ability to be formed and finished by traditional machining methods.  Developed especially for ceramics, the Chand Grindability Testing machine uses a fast-moving abrasive belt to obtain numerical indices of a material’s ease of grinding.  Rapid tests use simple test bars and a timed loading cycle.  Users can compare their material’s data to that from a variety of other materials tested in the same manner.