Tool wear, mechanistic force modeling, and surface finish in CFRP milling

This paper describes wear testing for two tool coatings, AlTiCrN and diamond, while milling a Toray 3900 prepreg system with plain weave carbon fiber architecture, T-830H-6 K fiber type , and 40 weight percentage epoxy resin. The testing objective is to establish the relationship between tool wear and: 1) the growth in cutting force coefficients for a mechanistic milling force model; and 2) degradation of areal roughness for machined CFRP surfaces. Flank wear width is used to quantify tool wear. It is observed that the diamond coating outperforms the AlTiCrN coating. Abrasive wear on the flank face is seen to be the dominant wear mechanism for the AlTiCrN coating with linear increases in flank wear width, areal roughness, and cutting force coefficients as volume is removed.