CemeCon Information News Machining CFRP with diamond

Machining CFRP with diamond

back

Indispensable and competitive advantage in the aircraft industry


Carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) have been indispensable in aerospace industry for a long time. As lightweight alternative they have already outranked aluminium in some applications with increasing tendency. But in machining the materials demand a great deal of the tools. In this field, if you bet on the wrong horse, you’ve already lost. With multilayer diamond coatings the user receives ideal conditions to also machine such highly abrasive materials economically.

Lightweight products can be greatly improved using carbon fibre-reinforced plastics (CFRP). Besides the significantly lower weight – even compared to the already lightweight aluminium, up to 40 percent weight can be economized – CFRP components are even stronger and stiffer. CFRP dampen mechanical vibrations significantly and reduce component volume and mass. This increases performance of aircraft and vehicles significantly.

No wonder that CFRP percentage in aviation industry grows steadily: Less than 5% CFRP were used during the construction of the A310 in 1983; the A380 achieves 25% today. This is a weight reduction of about 15 tons. More than 50 percent carbon fibre materials will be aboard the A350 in 2012. Only in this way the objectives of aviation companies can be achieved to reduce fuel consumption per kilometre and passenger by 50 percent, respectively reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 80 percent until 2020.


Strong abrasion demands hardest coatings

However, the hard carbon fibres cause extremely high abrasive wear of the cutting edge during machining, which requires cutting materials and coatings of highest hardness. Moreover, the fibres must be separated so that they do not come off the significantly weaker and thermally very sensitive resin matrix. Therefore, the focus in development of machining tools must be clearly on increased productivity. These include feed rates and tool life, but also adherence to high quality requirements.


Lift off lightly – Reduce costs

Heavily strained diamond coatings for industrial production are constructed customer and application specific because each tool manufacturer has specific demands on the performance of his tools. And the required tool life or feed can be achieved only through high quality and perfectly adapted diamond coatings. Compared to uncoated tools, in this way performance improvements of more than 500 percent are possible in some applications. An example shows with 90 drilling holes using an uncoated tool compared to 500 using a coated tool without malfunction of the tool, which enormous influence coatings have on performance. Even the high definitions in tolerance class H8 demanded by aircraft manufacturers can be realized with diamond coatings.


Conclusion:

Diamond coatings are the ideal finishing of a carefully developed drilling or milling tool and therefore an important element in the overall “Tool” concept.

Or with other words: “Diamonds are an aircraft manufacturer’s best friend!”