High performance materials are key enablers of technological development, manufacturing efficiency, and standard of living. The higher its operating rate AND its resistance to wear, the better the tool or component. Enabling new paradigm tool performance (simultaneous resistance to shock, heat breakdown, and wear) leverages pervasive improvement in major sectors of the economy.

Increasing WC-Co substrate tool wear resistance via hard CVD- or PVD-applied coatings (see Figure 2-left side) is used on about 80% of carbide tool applications. The coating thickness, at 4-15 microns, is limited to about 10% of the permissible tool wear tolerance, yet can extend tool life 5-10X. If coatings could be just 10X thicker, carbide tool life might be multiplied 10X(5-10X), or 50-100X! But delamination and cracking from different thermal expansion rates over large areas, bending, and surface loads severely limit coating thickness. Additional coating drawbacks are pronounced rounding of tool edges, high cost, and high Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) process temperatures required (900˚C -1200˚C) are often harmful to the sintered part heat-treatment, fine grain size, or geometry. Several CVD layers of different properties are often applied in an effort to “combine” one or two of these properties. Unfortunately, the desired properties of the next layer are not available until the first has worn through, so they never “combine” to operate simultaneously. Coated tools are scrapped before the thin external coating wears through to avoid catastrophic failure. Because conventional tools are thrown away after so little of their content has actually been consumed, they are inherently wasteful of material, energy, and time resources.

In contrast, TCHP sintered microstructure is a cellular pseudoalloy of a contiguous tough tungsten carbide and cobalt mechanical support and binder phase containing chemically unadulterated wear-resistant core particles. These particles (such as TiN, TiC, TiB2, ZrN, Al2O3, diamond, cBN, AlMgB14, or B4C) are dispersed evenly throughout the tough tool. When using multiple core particle materials to
 

enhance different properties, each material and its unique properties are available simultaneously at the working surfaces and cutting edges of the tool throughout the entire substrate. This design multiplies the volume of wear resistant material useable many times that in any possible coating, providing a continuously renewed (self-healing) wear surface.

The objective of TCHP is to provide cutting edges and wear surfaces that have 50-80 percent of the hard-phase edge and surface contiguity of a CVD coating, but at infinite “thicknesses” (and with harder and simultaneously-active engineered blends of core particles, e.g. diamond + cBN for

incomparable ferrous machining speed, feed, and wear performance), thereby enabling full exploitation of the machining tolerance with a single insert.

Because 100% of TCHP tool wear tolerance can be utilized (see Figure 2, right side), optimized TCHP variants will surpass WC-Co carbide tool life by several tens of times and coated carbide tool life by several times. The TCHP refractory phase continuously renews and “heals” the cutting edges and wear surfaces, retarding wear of the tough structural phase until the tool is worn to its tolerance limits.